I know you didn’t ask and probably don’t care, but free climbing and free soloing are different things. Free climbing uses a rope, but does not allow you to use artificial means to ascend, like pulling on gear you put on the wall. The gear is just there to arrest a fall.

Free soloing is where you climb without a rope. Free climbing uses a rope for safety, but upward mobility is hands and feet on wall. Aid climbing is where you climb by fixing gear to the wall and use it to ascend.

If you know what you’re doing, free climbing is pretty safe. Free soloing is not, but people do it successfully without their huge balls weighing them down.

As a side note, bouldering is also climbing without a rope, but you don’t climb high enough to make a fall fatal.

I did… that was the part about extracting value from a dying industry.

This is the market place, brah. If the US or EU want to keep up, they can subsidize EV manufacturing to the same degree. We are just too stuck on subsidizing O&G to realize that harvesting value from a dying industry is going to leave us out in the cold as the new technology matures.

Free market capitalism and what we operate under haven’t been the same thing for as long as I’ve been alive. What some may call “Communist China” is beating us at the game. Get on the bus or get run the fuck over.