I believe that the other caveman is carving a parking meter
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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The Far Side
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About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.
The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side
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That would be funny, but it looks more like a scale?
It really does look very much like a parking meter of the time, and the joke doesn't really make sense unless it's a parking meter. It's a rent-seeking/capitalism gag.
- The caveman on the left, is creating something transformatively useful, that once finished will change his life with how useful it is. Aka he's inventing the wheel.
- The caveman on the right is creating something that will act as a small but annoying tax on the work of the caveman on the left... doing nothing of intrinsic value but making the real invention a little bit less useful and helpful by charging the very first wheel for parking. Aka he's inventing useless self absorbed beauracracy, mankind's second most significant invention after the wheel.
The gag establishes the relationship between the two cavemen as a doer on the left and a beauracratic leech on the right. If the right is a scale, there's kind of nothing going on here. Not that there aren't far side comics where nothing is going on, but this one has a gimmick.
Different time I guess. Maybe parking meters looked like that back then
They did - not even that long ago... Man I feel old
Still do where I'm from, although they typically have digital displays now.
This is an example of the general design: 
It’s definitely a parking meter
The birth of rent seeking.
"I'm about to end this caveman's whole career."
Adapt. Improvise. Overcome.