inkskinned:

astriiformes:

in d&d, deer have 14 wisdom. a deer is just as wise as my ranger for whom i put his second-highest ability roll in wisdom and who uses wisdom to cast most of his spells. a deer is wiser than everyone in the friendship campaign party other than erwyn, who is tied with said deer. what the fuck

in the real life deer are about as smart as 4-year-olds. they have communication, planning, and cause-and-effect intelligence. we’re also selectively breeding for smarter and smarter deer – and recently deer have been observed teaching their young to watch for traffic. 

in my experience this makes deer just as wise as most frat boys.

other animals w/real-life “that’s higher than i expected” wisdom throws:

• crows (like most corvids) make us feel bad about ourselves and are about as smart as 7-year-olds. for your reference 7-year-olds understand and can confidently do multiplication tables usually up to x12 and understand fractions. crows know how to make tools and know how water displacement works.
• raccoons are also about as smart as 7-10 year olds and that’s why they wash their food before they eat it gbless
• cows, with 5-7 year old intelligence, and the fact they got bffs and like jazz music just an fyi
• coyotes, which are smarter than your dog + smarter than pigs, neither of which will be on this list bc, come on, we all know about poodles + pigs.
• we don’t even fuckken know when it comes to bears, we know they can remember as far back as 10 years + they have complex communication + social structures and are extremely adaptable but like …. ??
• we also Just Don’t Know about the octopus, who is currently engaged in some kind of undersea war
• we think elephants are self-aware. along with altruism, humor, and genuine concern, this makes them better than lots of politicians
• people always mention dolphins, chimps, parrots, and COMPLETELY overlook the true hero: pigeons, who can literally understand space and time as concepts. damn. 

wilwheaton:

“To make matters worse for Trump, there is little he can do to thwart the new investigation. Unlike the Mueller investigation, which Trump could end himself, the Cohen investigation in the Southern District would be extremely difficult for the White House to shut down. Trump could in principle fire the US attorney, a political appointee who serves at his pleasure, and appoint someone new with orders to end the Cohen inquiry. The civil servant prosecutors of the Southern District, however, cannot be fired except for misconduct. The strong tradition of prosecutorial independence means that, even if ordered to stop their investigation by Trump or a new US attorney, they would very likely treat such direction as itself a criminal obstruction of justice and find a way to keep digging.”

— Noah Feldman, “Crooked Trump?,” New York Review of Books

mostlysignssomeportents:

Comcast is America’s perennial most hated company, so it’s hard to imagine how it could get even less popular, but you’ve got to give the company credit: on the way to growing to never-seen size and profitability, it continues to lead its ever-more-unpopular industry in customer dissatisfaction!

It’s hard to reconcile: how could a company so hated continue to grow?
It’s almost as though the firm enjoys some kind of regulatory monopoly
in which it can gouge its customers for an essential of life while its
regulator insists that it owes no duty to the public in exchange for
this extraordinary privilege.

The latest American Customer Satisfaction Index  Telecommunications Report
reveals that Comcast has maintained its lead in shittiness, despite the
sinking tide of public dissatisfaction sending the entire telcoms
sector to a new low, chasing all ISPs to depths of hatred never recorded
in the annals of American commerce.

That said, Comcast has stiff competition from the rest of the telcoms
sector, whom everyone hates – just not with the ferocity that we
reserve for Comcast.

https://boingboing.net/2018/05/24/we-really-hate-them.html