Last time I tried to explain this, I got sidetracked by explaining how Proto East Slavic divided into Russian and Ruthenian (which, in turn, divided into Belarussian, Ukrainian and Carpatho-Ruthenian) and never actually got to the seventeenth century.

https://twitter.com/SevaUT/status/1488733008081399808

More seriously:
In the 9th century, the Varangians established a loose confederation of states under Prince Rurik.

We call that "the Kievan Rus"

The people in those states all spoke variants of the language we call Old East Slavic, which is the ancestor of four modern languages

Having said that HS2 won't be expensive to travel on ("which isn't true, because it will have thousands of seats that will need filling"), I should explain why.

You might think that it will need to pay back its costs and therefore will need high ticket prices.
You'd be wrong.

https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1355047510746787840

Welcome, folks, to
The Sunk Cost Fallacy
(sing that to the tune of "Adams Administration").

The amount it cost to build HS2 has nothing to do with how much you will pay for a ticket.

Even if you believe that HS2 will be really expensive and only rich people will use it (which isn't true, because it will have thousands of seats that will need filling), then at least that would degentrify other trains, making more room for the rest of us.

https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1355047510746787840

Monbiot is right that the business case is nonsense. What he misses is the reason why it is nonsense. It is nonsense because Treasury rules require it to exclude a number of actual benefits, so they massively inflated the benefist they are allowed to include.

The real answer to this is much simpler. "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" (Keynes). Are these redditors irrational? Yes. Is Gamestop going to produce long-term earnings to justify its stock price? No. Does that matter? No.

https://twitter.com/Kantrowitz/status/1354494321681068033

People have the right to invest how the hell they like and if you lose out, that's on you. If you don't like that, don't gamble. If you want to invest in fundamentals, take ten year positions.

The exception is securities fraud. This isn't a pump-and-dump scam.

So suck it up!

This seems really weird. What made the NZ response (and ROK, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, etc) work is that they have prevented infection arriving via quarantine.

The other big UK mistake was loosening restrictions before the elimination of community transmission.

https://twitter.com/juliamacfarlane/status/1354375431949053953

If you can get rid of community transmission then you can use test, trace and isolate to prevent it coming back from your non-community cases. Then you ensure it can't be reintroduced from other places that still have community transmission.

There is a bunch of nonsense being said in reply to @OwenJones84 and @AyoCaesar about "same-sex attraction".

Obviously, if you translate "homosexual attraction" literally, it means "same-sex attraction", but the word dates back to 1869, before sex and gender were distinguished. There are lots of cases where we say "sex" when we mean what we now call "gender" and some the other way around. That's just how human language works. You can dislike that, but there isn't much you can do about it.

Do you know why Christmas isn't on the Solstice? It's a calendar thing. When Julius Caesar set up the Julian Calendar in 48BCE, the spring equinox was set as 25 March, which would usually put the winter solstice on 25 December.

I keep seeing the point made that Jacob Rees-Mogg's opinions on abortion are the orthodox Catholic view and there are 5.7m Catholics in UK. This is an example of a common mistake, which is to take a religion's orthodox teaching and associate it with all the self-avowed adherents.