Bonjour bonsoir. You'll gladly have some adolescent college rock, won't you?

News news n📰ws:

• [fr] Vous reprendrez bien un peu de démocratie, "une introduction au jugement majoritaire en bande dessinée", lisez bien les 3 parties. 👍 Elsa.
• NYT: Our mothers as we never saw them, via [fr] Nouveau Projet.

  "The photos women sent me offer a key to how we, as daughters, want to perceive young womanhood. Pluck, sex appeal, power, kindness, persistence: We admire and celebrate these characteristics, and we long for the past versions of our moms to embody them. But if these characteristics are a prerequisite for a properly executed womanhood, does becoming a mother divest a woman of such qualities? In studying these photos, and each daughter’s interpretation of them, I’ve come to wonder what traits we allow our mothers to have, and which ones we view as temporary, expiring with age and the beginning of motherhood. Can a woman be both sexual and maternal, daring and responsible, innocent and wise? Mothers are either held up as paragons of selflessness, or they’re discounted and parodied. We often don’t see them in all their complexity."

• Economist: The world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data looks at Amazon/Google/Facebook monopolies. "The data economy demands a new approach to antitrust rules".
• [fr] Le temps : Lorsque l'amour ne rend plus aveugle, via Nouveau Projet.
• Then, a collection of articles on gentrification, which I was researching after several debates stuck at understanding the facts, but lacking background to argue whether it's inevitable and/or what can be done.
  • First, Wikipedia / Gentrification (ou en français, 'stie).
  • Slate (2015) The myth of gentrification.

    "It’s time to retire the term gentrification altogether. Fourteen years ago, Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard of the Brookings Institution wrote that gentrification “is a politically loaded concept that generally has not been useful in resolving growth and community change debates because its meaning is unclear.” That’s even truer today. Some U.S. cities do have serious affordability problems, but they’re not the problems critics of gentrification think they are. Worse, the media focus on gentrification has obscured problems that actually are serious: the increasing isolation of poor, minority neighborhoods and the startling spread of extreme poverty."

  • New Yorker (2016) Is gentrification really a problem?

    "In New York, regulations like rent stabilization not only limit the amount by which some landlords can raise rents but also restrict a landlord’s ability to decline to renew a lease. In Sweden, the rules are tighter: rents are set through a national negotiation between tenants and landlords, which means that prices are low in Stockholm, but apartments are scarce; a renter in search of a long-term lease there might spend decades on a government waiting list. Another solution is to allow more and taller buildings, increasing supply in the hope of lowering prices."

  • Citylab (2014) There's no way not to be a gentrifier.

    "people can't move to the neighborhoods to which they'd like to move, and are stuck in places with worse schools, more crime, and inferior access to jobs and amenities like grocery stores. [...]

    This, in turn, is the result of a curiously dysfunctional housing system – one that's set up to allow market forces to push up prices without regard for people who might be excluded, and to prevent market forces from building more homes and mitigating that exclusion. It's that combination, with an assist from generations of rotten and racist urban policies, that makes economic segregation so widespread and pernicious. [...]

    I'd like to suggest that you have another kind of responsibility: to be aware of these underlying systemic processes and use what social and political power you have to change them. The exact solutions can be debated, but I would start by lobbying your local government for housing subsidies for the low-income, protections against eviction due to rising rents, and an end to exclusionary caps on housing construction that keep prices artificially high."

  • Citylab (2017) The neighborhood that went to war against gentrifiers.

    “We want things like a new laundromat on the corner of Whittier and Boyle. We want our streets and sidewalks fixed. We shouldn’t have to wait until white people live here for someone to care enough to fix the sidewalks.”

  • Citylab (2017) Gentrification doesn't mean diversity.

    "Diversity is not necessarily benefiting the former residents. Most of the mechanisms by which low-income people would benefit from this change are related to social interaction—that low-, middle-, and upper-income people would start to talk to one another. They would problem solve with one another. They would all get involved civically together to bolster their political power. But what we're really seeing is a micro-level segregation. You see diversity along race, class, sexual orientation overall, but when you get into the civic institutions—the churches, the recreation centers, the restaurants, the clubs, the coffee shops—most of them are segregated. So you're not getting a meaningful interaction across race, class, and difference. If we think that mixed-income, mixed-race communities are the panacea for poverty, they're not. [...]"

    "We need community-based organizations that are focused on bringing people together across difference. I call these neutral third spaces. Public policy isn't geared toward funding community-based organizations in gentrified areas that are trying to bring people together to dialogue about inequality or differences. It’s not going to happen organically. There are very few foundations, a few city governments using their Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) money to focus on bridge-building. I really think we need that. We need affordable housing first, but we have to go beyond housing to make mixed-income, mixed-race communities work for everybody—to make them more inclusive."

  • NYT (2017) In one Berlin neighborhood, a grass-roots fight against gentrification as rents soar, via HN.

    "Under pressure from a growing grass-roots movement, the city authorities have put into effect a slate of measures, including rent caps, a partial ban on vacation rentals, development-free zones and increased social housing subsidies. The goal is to bridle the bullish housing market and conserve the diverse social and cultural makeup of the city center."

  • The Nation (2016) Can neighborhoods be revitalized without gentrifying them? Featuring Baltimore experimenting with "Community Land Trusts":

    "The idea would be to establish communally owned property under a democratic governance structure, which allows residents and the surrounding neighborhood to cooperatively manage land and property use."

  • Gothamist (2013): Ask a native New Yorker: How guilty should I feel about being a horrible gentrifier? and Bushwick native New Yorker unpacks her "deep hot anger" over gentrification.
• [fr] Décod'éco - Évasion fiscale : comment font les multinationales ?
• NYT: Hackers hit dozens of countries exploiting leaked NSA tool, via HN.
• Greg Kroah-Hartman: 9 lessons from 25 years of Linux kernel development and the 2016 Linux Kernel dev. report, via cron.weekly. 4600 new lines/day!