Routes and projects with K

I was planning to run this evening, but K caught me at lunch and we arranged to go for a climb. The humidity was astonishing but we had a good time, trying a few new routes and investigating a couple of the older ones neither of us had done. I surprised myself by sending a 6c with a big dyno — from a crap screwon foot up to a big positive sloper that looks like nothing quite so much as a bum! We also tried a couple of the longer routes up the pillar, where I declared myself too tired for a tough 6c whose first section was composed of nothing but a series of powerful compression moves.

At the very end we worked an intriguing 6b+ route featuring a balancy move up to a taijitu volume in the middle and what I thought was a big rocker and dynamic move up to a flake but which K correct read as a rockover, move up to an intermediate hold, up to the flake and then a mantle on the volume. Neither of us had any idea how to finish the route because the last two holds on the upper slabby section lacked anything that might be considered a foothold...

Long read on ethical investment

Fascinating Guardian Long Read piece on Dr Bronwyn King and her campaign to get insurance companies and pension funds to deinvest in big tobacco.

To those who challenged that tobacco stocks were historically good performers, King had a brisk rejoinder: "If a business can live with six million deaths and externalising €2tn in health costs a year while employing mainly children, then it probably won’t find it difficult making money. All it has to do is adjust its moral compass."

The piece raises a series of excellent moral points, not least the notion that, in acting in accord with the best interests of its shareholders, investment funds have a duty to consider more than simple financial returns; thus, the doctors working at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre might not want their money to be invested in an industry that causes the very diseases they've spent their careers treating...