$20 for food? Well, that will get you through breakfast if you are a lousy tipper.

Better make sure the hotel is within a mile or two of the work place and you don't go anywhere for lunch.

It takes me about half an hour for a week long trip. That is about $100 cost to the company. Then it has to go to my manager who has to look it over and then to HR. Altogether it probably costs about $200 to process the receipts.

Not according to the IRS. They allow a per diem rate (and it is much more than $20).
For New York City, the per diem rate is $303 lodging plus $71 food.
For Oklahoma City, where I am now, the per diem rate is $87 lodging and $66 food.
I would have to say that the lodging rate for Oklahoma City is lower than you are going to be able to find decent quality lodging in Oklahoma City. The overall average rate in Oklahoma City is $99, with three star rating average of $141 or more than double the IRS suggested per diem.
Contrast that to New York City, where the overall average rate is $221 and the three start average is $177. If I recall, the food in New York City is very pricey as well, although the IRS site only allows slightly more for the food in NYC than in OKC.
I guess if you are going to New York, get a per diem. If you are going to Oklahoma City, get a receipt.

I learned Fortran, then Pascal, then C, then 68000, then 6802. Well, in school anyway. I had already learned Basic when I was in 5th grade at home. When I first started working with C++, I was lost and confused and couldn't figure it out.
I went into Java with some trepidation, owing to my previous experience with C++ as an OOL. However, the OO model in Java was so much easier to understand that after having learned Java, I was able to go back to C++ and this time around it made sense.

I am anxiously awaiting the popping of the .gov bubble.

If they require you to use the internet, and desktop at home for business purposes then they absolutely should reimburse you for it. Clothes are something else entirely. I mean, presumably you were going to wear clothes anyway. Maybe they require you to wear clothes that you wouldn't normally wear. If it was specific, like a uniform, they do normally provide that sort of thing. If it is khakis, dress slacks, or a suit, I would expect that they would cover this in the dress code policy and it would be your understanding that part of your compensation is to cover those items. If they wanted to go so far as to outline a similar policy for home desktop and internet use for business purposes and make that part of your compensation, I would be agreeable to that as well, and would want the flexibility to adjust my compensation accordingly.
As an example, when my previous company went from providing temporary cell phones to their employees when traveling, to NOT providing them and still requiring the employees to have one, their should have been a commensurate adjustment to employee compensation to cover the cost difference.

This is what I don't understand about companies. They are too cheap to just reimburse you at a flat $50 rate for your cell phone, and so they will require you, an employee that costs them probably $100-$200 an hour, to go through and cross out the non-work related calls, then they will require someone else in HR who costs about the same to crosscheck what you did to make sure you are not lying, then they will reimburse you $45 because the phone bill was $90 and half the calls were company related. Total dollars recovered? $5. Dollars spent saving that money? $50-$100.
It is the same way with travel. Rather than give you a per diem of $100, they want itemized receipts, which you have to collect, enter into the system, submit, your manager has to review and approve, and then Travel has to audit and approve. All because they don't want you to go eat Ramen and pocket the other $97. They spend thousands of dollars of company time to save a few hundred dollars on travel expenses.

I am not aware of any construction company that requires you to have your own hammer and nails.
I am aware of some contractors that expect the customer to provide them with tools and consumables. This is baffling to me.
Oddly enough, I am also aware of some companies that require employees to bring their own keyboard and mouse. The keying facility in Mexico that we used to work with required their people to bring heir own because when they used company equipment, the equipment got broken very frequently. Apparently, the employees take better care of their own equipment. I'm not sure if Mexican law requires for them to be reimbursed. I would guess probably not.

Your business must be better at negotiation than the ones I have worked with. The last company had 300 employees and their plans cost them $100 per employee. No Data, No Texting. Limited to about 1200 minutes. They dropped that plan eventually and went to reimbursing as that was much cheaper. Then they dropped that and went to just not paying for employees phones at all, which was even cheaper. It should be noted that this company involved a lot of travel and cell phone was often the only means of contact with the employee.

I work for a small company that has the same policy. They do not issue corporate phones, but you must have a phone and must be reachable 24/7. You must receive work e-mails on your phone and in order to do that, you have to install software which allows the company full control of your phone, including remotely wiping it. This irks me, that the company will not buy me a phone, but reserves the right to brick the phone I pay for at any time. They do reimburse a certain amount for the phone bill, but you have to get the reimbursement request in within 30 days. if you don't, then you get nothing, and they won't let you go back in time and not answer your phone.

I never give any customers my cell phone number. Certain people at work know my cell phone number, but if I were ever to leave or get fired, all the people would know about it, probably before I do.

It's New York. Apparently, having 2400 square feet there is some sort of big deal.

That is kind of a surprisingly low number. I've seen about that number killed in a 6 story building I was in before we moved to this one. But then I guess it depends on how the outside of the building looks to a passing bird.

And then when you blow it up to appease the environmentalists, it destroys the ecosystem AGAIN.

Existing Facility Type A Kills X birds. Proposed Facility Type B kills Y birds where Y < X. Facility Type B is proposed to replace Facility Type A.
Facility Type B is sh*tcanned because it kills greater than 0 birds. Existing Facility Type B continues normal operation, killing X birds.

How about an almost blindingly intense light with increasingly uncomfortable hot temperatures the closer you get to it?

Introducing another species to weed out an undesirable species always backfires, especially when the introduced species is homo sapiens.