The point here is that bad changes get out no matter often or rarely how you do your deployment. Everywhere has deployed buggy code. Doing rapid deploys simply decreases the amount of time it takes to recover from that.
They didn't tell us that Vancouver was "the warmest major Canadian city" when they were telling us that we were being relocated here. All we knew was http://i.imgur.com/X2l9uxU.jpg
No, it isn't. As organizer of http://scaleconf.org/ I can tell you that almost all of the money goes towards venue hire, lunch/coffee/daytime refreshments, internet and AV equipment, and depending on the conference, flying speakers in.
Then, at the end, you've got a couple of thousand dollars left over, and that goes on the bar tab.
Think about how many dollars worth of alcohol you would drink during a two day conference, then drop the amount because there's a lot of buying in bulk and people who don't go to the parties or drink. It doesn't come anywhere near "most part of a $650 conf ticket".
