Conference fees

Vera is annoyed at what the conference has cost her and its disorganized state. Ricardo knows the inside story.

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Vera: Six hundred dollars! Three days of morning and afternoon teas, a cheap buffet, a program book full of errors and held in a school.

Ricardo: The organizers made a killing.

Vera: I heard it wasn’t even organized by academics. They outsourced it to professionals.

Ricardo: Exactly. That’s why they got so many names in the program wrong and the paper titles were truncated. They had no professional knowledge.

Vera: Six hundred dollars collected from 200 people is 120,000 dollars.

Ricardo: I’d put the real costs in the area of 20,000 max. Same organizers were off to do a boat show the next day.

Vera: At least when academics ran it they printed names in the program correctly. And we’d only have to find 50 dollars to attend.

Ricardo: I heard one of the organizers saying academics are a pushover. They don’t have a commercial sense, the organizers can charge what the market will bear and so it’s money for old rope.
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