I was intending to imply that the massive dollar flow to these administrative costs is not proportional to the value provided. The cost for your friend to fly

I was intending to imply that the massive dollar flow to these administrative costs is not proportional to the value provided. The cost for your friend to fly around was not in any way proportional to the price levied on the journal purchasers and users. I am very interested to hear more about the activities "behind the curtain", because (being a junior academic at a teaching-oriented institution) I haven't had any interaction with a journal publisher that provided actual value beyond providing a website for me to submit my work, and a branded stamp to certify that my work was correct. In every case, I have had to submit a camera-ready final copy that was typeset by me and typo-checked by either me or the unpaid reviewers, and at no point has anyone approached me or anyone else I know asking us to publish our work in journal X as opposed to journal Y. As far as I know, to the degree anything I have ever written has been read at all, it's because I put the PDFs online myself (technically in violation of the copyright agreement, but a behavior that seems to be tacitly accepted in practice). Of course, even after people read the online PDFs (to the degree those papers get read at all), people cite the paper as if they read it in the paper journal or proceedings...