Friends,
In year 5 of this online writing adventure, I will continue my annual tradition of shutting down for the holidays. I get to recharge that particular battery and readers who complain that they are behind can catch up if they so care.
This post is an organized recap with a few “user notes”.
Personal Favorites
The Worst Game Ever Made: This was a journey down the rabbit hole of Georgism which I basically think is the platonic ideal of capitalism. California’s eventual future, with its disparity between haves and have-nots, is a Central American country with
drug-lordsdigital addiction merchants’ compounds surrounded by beggars. It is also glaring to me that it is the epitome of anti-Georgism with a tax code that perpetuates a landed gentry. Remember vassals, send your landlord a holiday card. CRE is in the dumps and those low fixed-rate mortgages are a year shorter in duration. They can use the cheer.Sentimental: A letter to my son on his 10th birthday. Children are humbling.
Born On Third: Hating on nepos is an American sport and I don’t want to deny anyone a good time. But genuine envy of rich kids is resource curse amnesia. This post is about what it really means to be born on third.
The Alpha Player Problem: Games contain an elegant metaphor for common organizational behavior malfunctions
In 2023 I created or made substantial additions to these portals:
Money Angle
I wrote a lot of educational posts this year. It’s affirming to find out that the Moontower treatment of this material:
helps readers break through a learning barrier
is used to train juniors
inspires novel thoughts in adjacent contexts
Moontower’s Top Money Education Posts from 2023:
Understanding Return Math
Nuances of Measuring In Options
Financial Reasoning
Hands-On Socratic Tutorials For Basic Option Concepts
Practical Investing Topics
Money Angle For Masochists
I added Money Angle for Masochists to the letter this year. The alliterative phrase is going to stay but only because I didn’t know I should have called it the “Bridge of Asses.”
In A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft, James Somers writes:
Medieval students called the moment at which casual learners fail the pons asinorum, or “bridge of asses.” The term was inspired by Proposition 5 of Euclid’s Elements I, the first truly difficult idea in the book. Those who crossed the bridge would go on to master geometry; those who didn’t would remain dabblers.
Wikipedia says the pons asinorum or “bridge of asses” is:
used metaphorically for a problem or challenge which acts as a test of critical thinking, referring to the "ass' bridge's" ability to separate capable and incapable reasoners.
The entry later states that economist John Stuart Mill called Ricardo's Law of Rent the pons asinorum of economics.
Well…that’s just because he didn’t live to see option theory. I don’t mean the math details. I mean the conceptual rails of looking at a web of branching future payoffs, seeing how they could be replicated, and measuring the cost of that replicating portfolio today. It is the formalization of finance’s deepest truth — you cannot eradicate risk, but only change its shape.
With that, I push you onto the bridge.
[As always, I write these with a motivated high schooler in mind. I’m not sure I always get here and I do think these would be well adapted to video explainers but it’s just hard to prioritize that.]
Each of these posts is a little world of editorials embedded in explanations. I want to bring extra attention to Understanding Risk Neutral Probability because its editorials pull in ideas that are profound but relatively underexposed.
Within that post you’ll find:
👽Real World vs Risk Neutral Worlds
Final boss
My response here is a useful test of your understanding of some of these concepts. Can you identify the posts that best embody my claim?
Stay groovy ☮️
Substack Meetings
I was invited to be a part of the Substack Meetings beta. You can book a time to chat. I’m more expensive than a 900 number from 1988 and have a less sexy voice.
Book a meeting with Kris Abdelmessih
Moontower On The Web
📡All Moontower Meta Blog Posts
Specific Moontower Projects
🧀MoontowerMoney
👽MoontowerQuant
🌟Affirmations and North Stars
🧠Moontower Brain-Plug In
Curations
✒️Moontower’s Favorite Posts By Others
🔖Guides To Reading I Enjoyed
🛋️Investment Blogs I Read
📚Book Ideas for Kids
Fun
🎙️Moontower Music
🍸Moontower Cocktails
Becoming a patron
The Moontower letter is and will always be free. My writing is a search “for the others”. The “others” are people like you who are unlearning the mental frames that artificially narrow our choices.
If you are here you already understand that inspiration is a tradable good. It’s not as tangible as a cup of coffee, but it packs 10x the adrenaline with an infinitely longer half-life than caffeine.
If you feel inspired, you can upgrade to becoming a patron.