Feels like a good time to drop the snail vs. slug housing meme.
The crab housing market
Submitted 6 hours ago by ickplant@lemmy.world to memes@sopuli.xyz
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/460c14af-58fe-492f-926d-b53e7da401c4.jpeg
Comments
TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
someguy3@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Except in the mad scramble a crabl can be left without a shell, leading to certain death. Make of that what you will.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
How can this happen, if they all came with shells to begin with, and they can each only take one shell? Do they somehow end up with one crab too big for the remaining shell?
ElJefe@lemmy.ca 5 hours ago
Because it’s usually to large crabs duking it out for the larger shell. When one of them inevitably loses, all the other crabs that are lined up, by size, no less, immediately ditch their shells for the next size up. Leaving behind the smallest shell for a large crab. I got to see this first hand at a beach in Mexico when I was a kid. I had no clue what was going on with all these crabs lined up from large to small, it was so cool to watch. But sad too.
someguy3@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
It’s not always a perfect lineup and you get two or three fighting for a shell (not necessarily the largest), and they can’t go back to their old shell because it’s now taken.
dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 3 hours ago
That crabs me bro.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
That doesn’t make any sense.
The crabs should assign value to the shells to encourage more shell discovery.
Buelldozer@lemmy.today 2 hours ago
The crabs do that through self organization. There’s nothing stopping anyone from building a group of like minded people to do it.
tja@sh.itjust.works 58 minutes ago
The landlord is stopping me
Kolanaki@pawb.social 5 hours ago
We’re more like other kinds of crabs that if stuck in a bucket will pull down any other crab that dares attempt escape.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
One of us! One of us!
30p87@feddit.org 6 hours ago
I want to be a commi crab.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Conclusions are in our own interpretations. Here’s an example of a cynical take of the same situation:
I just learned that if a hermit crab finds a new shell that is too big, it will wait for other hermit crabs
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.
who need new shells to gather and then they will organize themselves by size and trade shells.
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.
and I am pissed that the crabs have a better housing market than we do.
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.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 minutes ago
desires a system where the larger
and strongercrabs should have their pick of the housing market andless powerful(smaller) crabs simply have to take whatever smaller,less desirablehousing is left over.Power and strength have nothing to do with it, they aren’t fighting over who gets the bigger shell, they’re trading.
Smaller doesn’t mean less desirable, otherwise the small crabs would not give up the big shell voluntarily. They want a shell that fits there size, not the biggest one.
This system takes into account size as opposed to our current housing system, which is all about power (in the form of wealth). We’d be better off if we considered size as we have a lot of small families in big houses (empty nesters) and big families in small houses (families just starting off in a small apt) and redistribution those could help both parties.
The problem is that we are in a “bigger is better” mindset, and that empty nest family doesn’t want to give up their house even though they don’t need it.
theneverfox@pawb.social 51 minutes ago
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
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 5 minutes ago
Again, I’m playing devils advocate here to highly a cynical take. This isn’t my position.
The crab that waved the others down doesn’t benefit more than any other crab, it’s just a mutually beneficial redistribution of shells
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.
ook@discuss.tchncs.de 3 hours ago
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
The crab story could just as easily be cynically re-written as an example of capitalism/free-market approach.
gressen@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 48 minutes ago
Wait are you telling me *restructuring our society to be as cruel as we incorrectly narrativize nature to