God, if only there was a way of importing workers and not having to rely solely on local birthrates to solve long-term demographics issues.

We could call it... 'shimmigration'.

Gunner might have used all his ammunition before the pilot got close... Or the plane remained outside of his firing arc.

You would have to be pretty confident to get that close to an enemy bomber. Might have been lingering for a while.

Well, someday you'll be not even a faint memory

No, at most a ghost or fallen leaf from your family tree

Your legacy's not yours to see nor is your eulogy

And you'll never know what it all means

No you'll be at peace before you sleep if you just keep this in mind;

That everything, and everyone goes with the passage of time

So... now you want to invade Russia?

Which OP wants to end, this ensuring they can't put up a good fight and instead get ethnically cleansed and incorporated into Putin's Russia by force.

So because they aren't strong enough to survive on their own, Putin (and the modern Russian Empire) has the right to invaded them and threaten the world with nukes?

Oh yeah, you seem totally pro-peace. Not defending an aggressor whatsoever. /S

You've just discovered the trope named 'power creep'.

It's why reboots were, and remain, so popular.

Anime is the ultimate trope-setter in this regard. Shows like Naruto; start with throwing knives well and a few years later They're giant transforming gods fighting on the moon, because... How do you ratchet the stakes back down? Not easily.

I just want to point out how strange it is to assign intent to an AI's joke telling.

Because it's literally just vomiting out things it's copying and tweaking, with no understanding. It has no good faith or bad faith. It's just churning out stuff.

Poorly executed joke

I also did a study of human history and found that mob rule leads to death and suffering on a massive scale and should also be avoided at all costs.

Like government defining disinformation is also what protects you from 'Your tribe cursed my cousin, so we all came over here to murder half of you and enslave/rape the other half if we think they look good enough. This'll teach you to cast curses.'

Or even just 'our daughter is a witch. We need to kill her.'

I'm pretty sure I can take down bot networks with willpower, facts and logic alone. I just have to make posts long and angry enough to outweigh theirs and then post them in response to every bot's post or comment. Seems doable in a weekend.

Interestingly, that wouldn't be physically possible.

The process of accretion in zero gee creates angular momentum by its nature: stuff slams into other stuff and that kinetic energy has to go somewhere, and it can't go any further towards or back away from the centre of gravity... so it goes sideways and turns into a spin.

That's why neutron stars generally rotate near the speed of light; all that matter came inwards with the force of a supernova, so supercharged the spin. Also why black holes spin and accretion disk form. You basically can't have a body of matter coalesce in space without it starting to spin at least a bit. Well, unless you're physically there to carefully place the matter bit by bit with near zero kinetic force, anyway.

If we had no moon then there would be no signficant drag (though there would still be a tiny, tiny, tiny bit from the sun and other bodies in the solar system, but barely noticeable even in astronomical timescales), and we would for all intent and purposes basically never stop or slow our spinning.

Long answer that I'll try to make short, but basically... Because tidal forces.

The tide on earth comes from the spinning, and the gravity from the moon interacting with the earth's spin. The ocean's water sloshes about relatively easily, but the tidal forces (the gravity) is actually affecting everything, all the crust and mantle. The entire planet actually flexes a tiny, tiny bit with each spin.

That flexing carries a cost; energy has to come from somewhere and it has to go somewhere. So the flexing turns into thermal energy; heat. Only very slight on earth, but still there.

Jupiter's moon Io is a giant pile of volcanoes because of this effect. It's super close to Jupiter and still spins pretty quickly and so flexes a huge amount, generates a lot of heat, so lots of magma flying about.

But that heat radiates into space slowly. Which over billions of years means the spinning planet loses energy. Which means it spins slower and slower.

Eventually it stops spinning and will always have the same face pointing towards the bigger object. Just like our moon does now. Eventually, far far in the future, the earth will also stop spinning (because of the tidal forces) and one side will always face the moon. That's why we believe the days were much shorter when the planet was still newly formed; it spun faster, but has lost roughly half it's spinning speed over the last 4.5 billion years. Because of the moon.

That has happened with a lot of moons in the solar system (because moons are small and don't have store much energy) and it can happen with planets too. Usually, the closer the little thing is to the big thing (e.g. moon near planet, or planet near star) the faster the energy comes out of it, the sooner it stops spinning.

And the thing that causes that to happen... Tidal forces. Same forces that create the tides on Earth. Thus; locked into place by tidal forces; tidally locked.

We're just fortunate that we have the oceans which slosh about so easily and obviously, otherwise it would have taken us a lot longer to figure it out.

I also think it would be interesting to speculate on how sentient life would manage time on a tidally locked planet.

Without the sun rising and falling, there sure wouldn't be any circadian rhythms. Would there even be sleep? We aren't even entirely sure why it evolved here, so on a planet that never even experienced the sun's movement... Could be quite interesting.

It comes off as an attempt at a joke at their expense. Not a very good joke to begin with, but once it gives a negative vibe... Pffbt.

Ah, so a cop, so... Zero accountability.

The US is a goddamn police state. Your cops already shoot an insane number of people, why do they need to do it remotely too? What a rotting shitpile.

Let us keep hoping that they manage to hang on long enough for it to happen, yeah?

Oooh, I didn't think of that... Wonder how I could play that out...?

Thank you! I wrote it with the idea that they were volcanoes all along. Kind of a primordial anthropomorphization thing with an elder god twist. Or, such was the original intent at least

Basically one of them was made of good quarrying stone, so people started quarrying. It ain't perfect but y'know... How would an immortal volcano try and understand being turned into a source of stone for a city?

It seems Reddit is breaking down, and I can't edit some minor things in this. First draft, not properly proofread.

A dark and terrible scream filled the sky and shook the world.

There was smoke, and blackness, and then silence.

'Blethine… your voice grows weak.'

'Yours also, Jlin. You are no longer powerful like you once were. Our voices may be tired for now, but I grow mightier every day, while you crumble into old age. How long until you are expended? How long until I may consume you?'

'You know the answer to that. The world will die a thousand times over befor- AGH!' 

Jlin yelped and hesitated. Flakes of the skin around his wrist, crackled and grey, crumbled off and was gone. Both the immortals paused and stared in confusion.

This was not their doing.

For many ages, the two immortals had clashed in close combat. Slowly they had stalked one another, circling, approaching and finally, wrestling. Their voices belching forth their power, black-white fumes blasting out with every cry of war, the skies darkening in return. The trees had burned and the animals fled. The forces of nature unleashed.

But now they went silent. The empty eyesockets of their craggy faces stared, seemingly blinking, at the injury, not understanding. Neither had ever landed a blow. Never suffered this kind of injury. This was beyond their understanding. The hole was small and dark. A tiny speck of flesh.

'Blethine… what have you done?' asked Jlin slowly, his wizened face contorted. Flashes of red fire tinged his lips, a bubbling anger within.

'I have done nothing, I know nothing! What tricks have you devised?!' Blethine yelled back, his soot-black visage broken only by a thin cap of white hair. 

'This is no trick…' Jlin leaned his head down towards his hand, craning to see. The immortals were powerful, but ponderous. Their arms rested loosely at their sides, their heads atop fat, broken necks. They both struggled to move at any pace. But they had time.

'it is a hole…' said Jlin, slowly. A craggy, open hole had opened in his wrist, the white and grey flesh beneath exposed. It was not deep, but wide. There was no blood. 

'You lie. That is no hole I have ever seen.' spat Blethine. 'Holes are deep and winding, forged over an eon, a testament to time. That is-... It's…'

'-a hole' said Jlin, firmly. He stood upright again and glared at Blethine. 'I see only what it is, not that which you would prefe- AGH!' 

He screamed again, clutching to the side of his torso, where another hole had appeared, larger than the first.

'WHAT IS HAPPENING' he yelled, black smoke pouring forth, mixed with the red flame of fury.

Blethine stared, still confused. Then he saw it; a tiny trail of white leading away from Jlin's Pierced side. A tiny, winding sliver, almost too thin to see amongst the distant green and undulating hillocks.

It was a trail of Jlin's flesh. Thin, long and white.

'You are beset, Jlin'. Said Blethine with confidence. 'you are weakening, your form crumbles each day, and now your flesh is being taken. You will not long survive.'

'don't mock me…! If this thing comes for me, it will  surely come for you too!' snarled Jlin, fire and fury cascading from his mouth. The black and red smothered the trail and hillocks, coating all with darkness again.

The darkness cleared again quickly, the black soot turned to green.

Jlin yelped once again. Another chunk was taken.

He swatted with his grey, oversized arms, flailing and casting grey pieces of skin askew, rubbing until the white flesh beneath was exposed. 

Blethine laughed, then paused.

It was more than a trail now. It was… something. Piles? Circles? Something was putting Jlin's flesh into mounds. Something smaller and faster than Blethine could make out. They were stripping Jlin of his flesh and making it into… nests?

'Jlin, look, your mysterious tormentors…' he said pointing with a smile. 'they come for you now, but why?'

Jlin looked up at Blethine, with a red glare of rage. Fire dripped from his mouth.

'Isn't it clear, Blethine? They come for what lies within; our power, our grace, the fire of the undying. They see it within us and they come to claim it as their own '

Blethine balked, hesitated. He looked at the flakes of Jlin's body being carried away in a blur, to become part of the growing piles of flesh.

He then laughed.

'they come for yours perhaps Jlin. Mine remains untouched.' he gloated.

'for now. Perhaps they save the worst until last.' Jlin spat.

'perhaps I'm made of different stuff', said Blethine, pointing to his rougher, tougher skin. The two were not identical, it was true.

Jlin winced and slumped. Great flakes were now coming away, charged by some tiny, blurry beasts below. The piles grew closer and taller. The green hillocks around them changed shape.

The things, whatever they were, were using the green on the hills to made other little piles. They were swarming around Jlin, barely paying attention to Blethine.

'your flesh is tasty to them, Jlin, you have become a delicacy. It's a pity that I could not be the one to devour you.'

Jlin closed his eyes and curled himself up tight; the smoke and fire trapped inside.

'No. They want the fire of the undying, of this I am quite sure. If they want it, and I am destined to die, then I will give them what they seek.'

The smoke and fire vanished, bubbling inside Jlin's mighty chest.

Blethine laughed and belched black fumes. The smoke and darkness made the tiny things wary, but they were quickly back, scraping the skin from Jlin.

Jlin could feel himself being broken away, tony flake by flake. He was mighty, yes, but Blethine was quite right; he was losing this fight. The two had been locked in combat, to drown and consume the other in the fire of the undying, and now Blethine had somehow beaten him with this trick.

No. He will not die on Blethine's terms.

He silenced himself, felt his belly churn red. The smoke and fire rose higher, and stronger. The mounds of his flesh grew closer and larger, until he was covered in them, coated in the nests of these… things.

Blethine watched, bemused, smoking and puffing and laughing.

Jlin felt the holes grow deeper inside him, his surface being flattened and stripped away. The tunnels bored faster and faster, until they reached his fire within. It barely tapped the pressure growing inside.

This was it. All the time he had left.

Jlin stood up and screamed his deepest scream. The fire and smoke erupted, too much to evem glow red. This scream was too much for Jlin, it's power too intense. He had built this chance. the fire of the undying could never be contained for long.

His face broke apart and was pulverised, his grey-white flesh turned to dust. His sides slipped away and broke wide open, and flowed away like water.

The sky darkened once again and the earth shook with pain. The tiny blurry animals and all their carefully arranged piles of flesh were flattened, buried, burned away. The dust of Jlin's once mighty form buried them.

And when it cleared, Blethine still stood proud and tall, overlooking the shattered remains of Jlin. He would rise again. And then, their fight would resume.

Jlin the volcano had not yet spoken for the last time.