No more Sky Bars? New NECCO owners shut the whole thing down today

Heartbroken. Those are my favorite Christmas candy.

Good journalism is worth paying for.

(And don't start with "The Globe is not good journalism." If they suck so much, why do you keep going there?)

Thanks

"I also liked the 90s retro-jazz/klezmer/blues band of the same name, shared their annoyance with them being lumped in with the brief swing-band revival that was happening at the moment they finally had a hit. (Or maybe "Hell" and the band would have languished in obscurity if not for lucky timing. Still.)"

One of my "got aways", from summer 1999, was a girl from North Carolina summering here and doing City Year, and hanging mostly in Harvard Square. I always remembered the Squirrel Nut Zippers patch on her bag. And I always remembered how weird it felt to like to be kinda into someone who was into (what I assumed was) swing music, when I was 100% in street punk and the like, and cross-pollination of scenes was verboten (save for the kids in my orbit dabbling in creepers and Stray Cats era Brian Setzer).

So in short, today I learned that SNZ weren't actually part of the swing revival.

my first job in the city, when one of our many bygone candy-makers, maybe an outpost of Schrafft's, was still making some kind of chocolate-covered peppermint patty right across from the T stop. The smell of that candy now evokes a very specific sense of callow first-job anxiety and excitement and optimism in me. It's one of many memories that is vividly tied to scent: I believe it's because the area of your brain that processes those sensations is adjacent to a part that stores long-term memories.

I don't have the greatest long-term memory anymore, but certain smells suddenly, powerfully evoke recollections of very specific times and places from long ago. Rotten leaves: the little pond in the woods where my fifth-grade buds and I set up a tiny ice-hockey rink, with three logs frozen into the ice to form a goal. Gasoline: a fuel stop on the way to a family reunion when I was eight. Some fragrant species of tree: playing with Tonka trucks at the edge of a quiet side street in front of my house when I was five. A particular perfume: my first teenaged fumbling in the dark with a strawberry-blond beauty I was mad for.

I wish I could recall those things at will, am still surprised when a faint whiff of something brings back not just memories, but lucid sensations, emotions. It's all packed in there somewhere in my brain, only gets unlocked when I catch those aromas. A dazzling, nearly heartbreaking thing, and too rare.

But like you, I am worried about the employees and kind of sad that the era of locally produced candy might be going away.

shifting jobs to lower-wage areas. Our mills closed back in the 30s when jobs moved to the South: sorry, Fall River and Lowell and Haverhill. For the last 30 years, it's mostly been about moving low-skilled labor offshore. Once the current inventory runs out, your next candy heart will probably be made in Bangladesh.

The West built the Internet and the supply-chain applications that made large-scale outsourcing efficient and profitable. The current folly is that tariffs can bring those jobs back, when we should be moving to reskill workers for a global economy in which you can never win the race to the bottom on low-skill labor costs -- never mind how robotics is imminently about to undercut many of those countries -- or trying to resuscitate (figurative and literal) dinosaur industries like coal mining when we should be emulating China, investing in the renewables that are clearly the highly-profitable and geopolitically strategic future.

Germany did right by its class of workers that isn't suited for service-industry jobs, building a parallel education track to cultivate good-paying, high-skills manufacturing jobs that can't easily be replicated in third-world countries, and protecting those where necessary. To remain competitive over the next 20 years, we need to arm our workforce with the kind of education and skills that can't be replaced by AI, machine learning, big-data analytics, and robots. For one simple example: work in a fast-casual restaurant? Check out Spyce in DTX, an MIT student project that uses robot chefs, and tremble.

About them AI-assisted robots: they're software, too. Your clerical, administrative, customer-service, IT support, HR, marketing, telesales or writing job may also be toast, the more routine and less driven by judgement or artistic talent, the worse. Those technologies will further cripple our working- and middle-class economy without dramatic action very soon. President Chinese Ugly-Necktie Factory has no goddamned clue about any of that, and that's going to seriously fuck many of the voters who felt left behind by the current global economic reality, and trusted him to improve their lot and that of their kids.

We're facing the prospect of the sunset of America as the world's greatest economic power, and that clueless asshole is watching Fox News for four hours a day and tweeting about the lawyer he once needed to cover up his extramarital dalliances. Don't think for a second that Putin and Xi aren't pinching themselves every day at their luck. (Okay, Putin is thanking his hard work to put Trump in office, not luck, but he's still grinning over every breakfast at the unprecedented weakness and stupidity of this American President as a global adversary.)

If you're not already rather wealthy, and want your children to hold onto some small prosperity in the coming years, encourage them to gain the education, emotional intelligence, and ability to continually learn and adapt that will let them work as a guiding manager and complement to the coming workforce of AIs and hardware and software robots. Many of the working- and middle-class careers of 2018 are going to disappear in their lifetime, and there won't be enough jobs in the trades and elder care to go around.