Gift Guides 2024

Moontower Munchies #91

Dec 11, 2024

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Friends,

I approach the holidays with a spirit of slow-down. Get rest. Review, regroup, refocus. Today’s reads match the season. Get cozy and enjoy🍵❄️

Underrated ways to change the world (7 min read)
Adam Mastroianni

Adam’s writing has been one of my favorite discoveries this year. The subtitle for this post is “How to get a good heart unstuck”.

The entire intro is a compelling lead-in:

A lot of people would like to make the world better, but they don’t know how. This is a great tragedy.

It’s tragic not only for the people who need help, but also for the people who can help, because good intentions start to rot if you don’t act them out. Well-meaning people who remain idle end up sick in the heart and the head, and they often develop exquisite ideologies to excuse their inaction—they start to believe that witnessing problems is as good as solving them, or that it’s impossible to make things better and therefore foolish to try, or that every sorrow in the world is someone else’s fault and therefore someone else’s responsibility.

We get stuck here because we assume that there are only two paths to improving the world. Option #1 is to go high-status: get rich so you can blast problems with your billions of bucks, or get into office so you can ban all the bad things and mandate all the good things. Only a fortunate few are powerful enough to do anything, of course, so most of the people attempting to improve the world through the high-status route will end up either begging our overlords to do the right thing, or trying to drum up the votes necessary to replace them.

Option #2 is to go high-sacrifice: sell everything you have and spend your life earning $7/hr to scrub the toilets in an orphanage. Only a virtuous few will have the saintliness necessary to live such a life, of course, so most of the people attempting to improve the world through the high-sacrifice path will end up writing checks to the martyrs on the front lines.

These paths aren’t wrong. They’re just too narrow. Money, power, and selflessness are all useful tools in the right hands, but the world is messed up in all sorts of ways that can’t be legislated against, bought off, or undone with a hunger strike. When we focus on just two avenues for making the world better, we exclude almost everybody, leaving most of us with a kind of constipated altruism—we’ve got the urge to do good, but nothing comes out.

I don’t know all the ways to get our good intentions unblocked. That’s why, whenever I spot someone changing the world via a righteous road less taken, I write it down on a little list. I glance at that list from time to time as a way of expanding my imagination, and now I’m sharing it in the hopes that it’ll do the same for you.

He gives 7 examples and the post is a terrific follow-up to his earlier one There's a place for everyone (or fantastic niches and where to find them)

The best gift-giving advice I've ever received (3 min read)
Paul Bloom

This short read holds nice gift-giving advice: Buy a special version of an everyday thing

This pairs well with Audrey’s The Ultimate Men's Gift Guide (2024). Although, it’s not exactly a special version of an everyday thing, I fully endorse her recommendation of portable car jumpstart battery. They also double as OP powerbanks.

Other gift guides:

Esquire’s 63 Best Tech Gifts to Buy in 2024
Wirecutter’s List of Gift Lists
Lenny’s Newsletter holiday gift guide 2024 (this is the 3rd list where I have seen someone stan the Neo Streamdeck despite not being a Twitch streamer.)
Gift guides, unstacked (Substack’s “guide to the guides”)
Shut up & Sit Down’s Boardgame Gift Guide for 2024

🌙Moontower Recommended Book Bundle for Traders

Laws of Trading by Agustin Lebron
Financial Hacking by Philip Z. Maymin
Retail Options Trading by Andrew Mack & Euan Sinclair
Trading Volatility by Colin Bennett (free)
Advanced Portfolio Management: A Quant's Guide for Fundamental Investors by Giuseppe A. Paleologo

And of course gifting moontower.substack :-)

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