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Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

Not to dismiss the issues here, but the entire American automotive sector works like this.

It's practically standard policy for OEMs to stiff smaller vendors with flagrant disregard for their obligations, because every day of delay and every dollar they don't have to pay is more margin for the OEM. In many cases it doesn't even matter if doing so it's detrimental to the long term health of the OEM, as happened during the COVID supply shocks. Finance gets their way.

As an engineer, I've found out from more than one vendor that the delivery I was expecting to start production isn't happening because finance just decided they didn't want to issue payment.

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97b in revenue per year. 10% of cars is made by suppliers, so maybe 9b goes to suppliers. 750m of liabilities per month. There's going to be millions hanging out there perpetually. AKA normal for every large business.

p.s. Tesla is not indebted like every other business (10-15x less debt, 5-6x more cash), so interest doesn't really count for them.

It’s like the Gastronomie Branche in Vienna

Can you share what that means? To a non German speaker this is of no significance

He used the German term for the hospitality sector.

As a German speaker, it doesn’t make much sense either

Agreed, or like the the inshoku gyōkai in Tokyo.

I think this needs to be understood by more people, and as a society, we need to start acting against these practices (e.g. by collectively blacklisting organisations who do not fulfil their obligations).

Well then they'll just source the part from abroad. This is the same flavor of thinking as "tech workers should unionize".

Excuse me? Unionization is responsible every worker's rights law ever passed.

Exactly, tech workers would be fools to not unionise. All of them, in every country.

Let them. And let them eat the higher cost - foreign suppliers will not ship that stuff for free, and will demand securities for large orders. At some point, there will be a financial equilibrium.

After working at small companies most of my career. Anytime someone angrily states that little people must pay their bills or else I reflexively think about how much corporate America does not. Really common they'll withhold the last payment until they need something else.

I keep coming back to a study I read a long time ago where they administered college students a test to score sociopathy as freshmen and again as seniors. Not surprising seniors scored lower then freshmen, except business and economics where they scored a lot higher. Makes me more receptive to the old school idea that college is partly there to provide a moral education.

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