Matthew Butterick:

But more importantly, in practical terms — what would be the point? Since 2011, I’ve run a small font business. Not long after I release a font, it will be uploaded to some public pirate-software website. I can’t control that. Like every other kind of digital-media file, anyone who wants to pirate my fonts can do so if sufficiently motivated.

For that reason — and independent of copyright law — my business necessarily runs on something more akin to the honor system. I try to make nice fonts, price my licenses fairly, and thereby make internet strangers enthusiastic about sending me money rather than going to pirate websites. Enough of them do. My business continues. (Indeed, in terms of rational economic choice, I’ve argued that software piracy doesn’t exist.)

If Trump declares that the U.S. is laying claim to all of the green cheese on the moon — say, to lower the price of dairy groceries — the news media should not respond with fact-finding articles with headlines like “How Much Cheese Is on the Moon?” They should respond with headlines like “How Many Marbles Are Left in Trump’s Head?”

Tom Fairless, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link; here’s a News+ link too):

The German research echoes recent reports by the Budget Lab at Yale and economists at Harvard Business School, finding that only a small fraction of the tariff costs were being borne by foreign producers.

By analyzing $4 trillion of shipments between January 2024 and November 2025, the Kiel Institute researchers found that foreign exporters absorbed only about 4% of the burden of last year’s U.S. tariff increases by lowering their prices, while American consumers and importers absorbed 96%. [...]

Rather than acting as a tax on foreign producers, the tariffs functioned as a consumption tax on Americans, the report said. “There is no such thing as foreigners transferring wealth to the U.S. in the form of tariffs,” said Julian Hinz, an economics professor at Germany’s Bielefeld University who co-authored the study.

This is what economists expected, but it’s always important to measure actual results, no matter how obvious the conclusions seem in advance. But this one feels like we could file it next to “Sun continues to rise in east, set in west.”

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF last week. Connecting user accounts to third-party APIs always comes with the same plumbing: OAuth flows, token storage, refresh logic, and provider-specific quirks. WorkOS Pipes removes that overhead. Users connect services like GitHub, Slack, Google, Salesforce, and other supported providers through a drop-in widget. Your back end requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh. That’s it.

Simplify your integrations with WorkOS Pipes.

Starting with a few words on the new app icons.