A Man-made "Natural Backyard Playground?" What Next?

The NC Natural Sciences Museum just unveiled its new "Natural Backyard Playground" in Raleigh. At a cost of $10,000 this playground features "A new natural play area with tunnels, digging sites and water experiments for young children..." “It’s very much a trend in the natural sciences to have a space like this,” said Emlyn Koster, the museum’s new director. I remember playing in a place like that. It was the large area of woods behind our neighborhood. I would disappear for hours, play in the creek,catch crawfish, imagine a fallen tree was a pirate ship and have sword fights with sticks. Have we gotten to the point where we have to build "natural" places to play so that parents can continue to "helicopter" over their kids? The article quotes one girl's mom as saying “I think it’s everything – in terms of her intellectual development and fostering her curiosity, the natural world is everything.” I guess the natural world is everything, even if its man-made. http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/09/26/3230280/nc-natural-sciences-museum-build.html

Paris Takes On Free Enterprise and Competition-Big Brother at Work

According to an article I saw today a Paris court of appeals has issued a ruling that forbids a cosmetics store on the famous Champs Elysées to stay open past 9:00 pm. instead of its regular closing hour of midnight or 1:00 am. The reason? The unions think that employers are taking unfair advantage of the workers by making them work "anti social" hours. the only thing is, half of the staff who work the long hours do it voluntarily, and get paid 25% more than the day shift. The store, Sephora, says it does 20% of its business after 9:00 pm, and many of the workers have signed a petition against the ruling. Sephora is not the only one affected. Apple has been forced to close at 9:00 as well, and Abercrombie and Fitch will face legal action soon. Retailer H&M had to fight to open on the street after the city ruled that it would be "one clothing store too many." Well, Paris has an unemployment rate of more than 10%, so you would think the unions would be fighting to help create more jobs, instead of fighting against them. The article states "France has a raft of regulations governing shopping, and its labor unions ensure that they are strictly enforced. As well as strict limits on opening and closing hours, the rules only allow sales during certain periods of the year, price promotions are circumscribed, loss leaders are illegal, store sizes are limited and even the types of shops allowed to open up are regulated." Wow! Is that where America might be headed? Instead of letting a business decide what hours to open, what to charge, how much profit (or not) even what kind of shop you can open, in Paris it is now up to "Big Brother." George Orwell died in 1950, but it looks like his 1984 prediction is finally coming true, just 29 years late.