No where in those articles does it state that making hamburgers has been treated as manufacturing.
In fact the cbs article says "The report does not recommend that burger-flippers be counted alongside factory workers."
There was a report that discussed definitions and how they affected things like tax breaks. The news articles had fun speculating how it would help labor statistics if they did start counting these as manufacturing jobs. But it was just speculation. Wild speculation.
"According to a White House report, new manufacturing jobs might be as close as your nearest drive-thru." is somewhat telling, as is the message in the report that if you agree you are a manufacturer, you get tax breaks.
It's had an effect in what has been since classified as manufacturing. Here's a slide show regarding McDonalds' operations in India.
Procurement of raw materials:
•Vegetables from Ludhiana (Punjab)
•Chicken from Mumbai (Maharashtra)
•French fries from USA
•Valla Mine fish from New Zealand
PROCESS
The food manufacturing process at McDonalds
is completely transparent and the whole
process is visible to the customers.
I think the author of this article is the same researcher mentioned in that chapter. And the drug dealer story in Freakonomics. Either that, or all Indian names sound the same to me.
Flickr's main competition isn't with services that have feature parity with them, it's more with the growing list of free image sharing sites. Imgur, twitpic, facebook, picassa web, even dropbox. Flickr's value add is rapidly becoming smaller and smaller, which could very easily undermine their business model.
Exactly. I used to have a flickr account but since dropbox/facebook came along if I want to share anything it goes in dropbox (public) or facebook (public, but it's easy for my family to see the pics).
