That's a lousy analogy. A better analogy in this case would be that someone offended by apartheid took an axe to the bus, and after being arrested, ranted about the white people's plot to breed black people into Morlocks. Does that help clarify why Lumsdaine is such a counter-productive "activist"? His attempt was doomed to fail -- it would not stop either the military-industrial complex, or even the particular program he went after, but would put off practically everyone who disagreed with him and some of those who did agree with him.

Unless a state passes a right-to-work law (California has not), "closed shops" are allowed under Federal law and typically required by union contracts. A "closed shop" agreement means that employees must be union members at the time of hire, or must join the union within a certain period. To conform with the First Amendment, employees who do not wish to pay for the union's "extra" activities (beyond collective negotiation for their bargaining unit that the employee belongs to) can opt out of full union membership and pay a reduced rate for the union's representation. The reduction is almost never a big reduction, which might surprise people who know how much unions spend on political activity. Also, people who do opt out can no longer vote on what the union should negotiate for, and unions like to make them social outcasts, so there are strong incentives to not opt out.

Jimmy Hoffa was unavailable to comment for this story about the Teamsters' violent behavior and links to organized crime.

The money to pay for benefits will come out of the employee's paycheck one way or another. If the employer has to pay employees when they're not working, it means the employee's per-working-hour salary will be lower than it would be otherwise.

Drivers who would get "50% pay when ill" are probably not that likely to stay home, and most companies that have policies like that require a doctor's note when someone takes advantage of the policy (to deter people from abusing it). Making your employer part of your relationship with your doctor should be an option for the employee, not a requirement.

You do know that IEEE 754 defines, and two IBM mainframe architectures implement, decimal floating point formats and arithmetic, right? Some languages -- mostly to support financial applications -- provide data types that are defined in decimal floating-point terms.

Using these is uncommon, there are various tradeoffs for decimal floating point, and the values are encoded using bits, but the high-level semantics and in some cases hardware instructions are explicitly base 10.