My favorite conference-that-is-not-really-a-conference is Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. The bar to get a paper in is really low, and it's set at a nice resort in Hawaii. The whole conference would just empty out all day so people could go to beaches, etc. It starts on a Friday and ends on a Monday. About the only highlight for me was sitting down at the bar and spontaneously meeting Lynn Conway- "what do you do?" "oh, I worked on VLSI...."
Not much industry there though, unless it's changed in recent years. One of the more scientifically productive conferences because of the connections that people establish.
(Inside JPMorgan is so crowded and not so useful. I got a really really bad impression of 10X when I saw their debut at JPMorgan but that was an incorrect impression because they have done really well, mostly by not actually doing any of the products they touted at their presentation.).
Unlikely. Everyone who visits the conference, which is on an interdimensional craft only visible to Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin who have dreamed it up, is replaced by a mind-replicant whose memory of the conference has been wiped, right before their original self starts to play a 1234.567 hour game of Rummikub, where there are no rules and you must guess all of the tiles, on the way to a virtual conference in a space station mirage outside of what you call KOI-94 in the Exosyzygy system, because they have a nice spa there and there is a convenient proprietary video conferencing system for this part of the universe.
Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference.
I suspect you are thinking of burning man
Please don't mention the beast that is at the heart of SF. It does not like the publicity.
At the end, all the doctors fought to pay the bill because it was a tax write-off (business expense? I don't know how professional doctors with practices account for these things). As a grad student in SF living on $25K/year it was quite an eye-opener.
Either these doctors went to the Michael Scott School of Business or it was some other reason they were fighting over who pays.
A tax write off is only worth (dollar amount - (dollar_amount * tax rate in percent)
Example: You spend $100 and pay 30% in corporate tax. Your write off that you spent $100 for is worth $30, end result is you’re out $70.
If you let someone else pay and just pay $30 of taxes on your $100, you keep $70, which is over twice as much money as the previous scenario.
If no one else was willing to pay for the meal, having the business pay for it would save you the tax rate.
This only makes sense if it’s something like a car that you’re going to own anyways, not for fancy ass meals unless that’s how you eat anyways.
At least that is how it would work in the UK if it was allowed.