this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
987 points (99.4% liked)
Memes
12967 readers
845 users here now
Post memes here.
A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.
An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.
- Wait at least 2 months before reposting
- No explicitly political content (about political figures, political events, elections and so on), !politicalmemes@lemmy.ca can be better place for that
- Use NSFW marking accordingly
Laittakaa meemejä tänne.
- Odota ainakin 2 kuukautta ennen meemin postaamista uudelleen
- Ei selkeän poliittista sisältöä (poliitikoista, poliittisista tapahtumista, vaaleista jne) parempi paikka esim. !politicalmemes@lemmy.ca
- Merkitse K18-sisältö tarpeen mukaan
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Conclusions are in our own interpretations. Here's an example of a cynical take of the same situation:
So a less powerful crab cannot take full advantage of the shell, but recognizes its value to larger more powerful crabs. This is also an argument for scalping. If you find an expensive console or GPU which you can't afford long term, but you know you could carry the debt temporarily, you could buy it yourself then sell it to someone else later who could afford long term and you would personally pocket the profit. It could be argued that thats what the original-large-shell-finding small crab here is doing: scalping.
The original smaller crab knows that larger crab will cast off its current shell, which would be substantially better than the shell the smaller crab has, so it can still personally gain from finding the big shell it can't use, but its accepting a hand-me-down cast off only when the larger more powerful crab gets something better.
So the poster desires a system where larger and stronger crabs should have their pick of the housing market, and less powerful crabs simply have to take whatever smaller, less desirable housing, is left over.
Again, this is just a different interpretation for the meme. I'm not advocating for a position.
It's like, the opposite of scalping. You can look at anything through the terms of markets and opportunity costs, but most of it is myths about how the world works
There's no exchange here, there's no loss, only gain. A shell that's too big isn't an investment, it's a danger. The crab that waved the others down doesn't benefit more than any other crab, it's just a mutually beneficial redistribution of shells
Again, I'm playing devils advocate here to highly a cynical take. This isn't my position.
You're assuming a perfect distribution of resources equal to the needs of all, but studies show it doesn't always work out that way and there's a hierarchy and a struggle for the prime resources in the hermit crab society.
"In the field, we also occasionally observed 2 or 3 tug-of-war queues radiating out from a single vacant shell, with the largest crabs in each queue struggling to gain controlof the vacant shell. Such tug-of-wars between multiple queues appeared to inhibit vacancy chains as in some cases this situation lasted up to 4h without any crabs moving into the vacant shell. These findings indicate that the formation of hermit crab queues and other linear dominance hierarchies involves more complex social interactions than previously thought(Chaseetal.2002)."
source: Social context of shell acquisition in Coenobita clypeatus hermit crabs.PDF
Once again, I don't have a horse in this race, I'm just participating in the discussion, not advocating policy or reflecting my views on our human society.