I think it has more to do with the phone being tied to an individual, the banking and spending activities being tied to the phone, and the government having some hardware attestation about how people are spending their money and with whom. If you root a phone, you can change things like the MAC addresses. You may be able to futz with a softSIM/eSIM. That makes you harder to track.
I don't think this is actually happening. There is an enormous loss to scams mostly by tech illiterate people using the preinstalled operating system. I don't think the losses that involve user installed OSes are in any way significant.
The problem is that in the US it's a fixed amount vs in Germany a proportion of your income. This works OK for higher incomes but for lower incomes it's a big problem. And as always, the people in the middle get screwed. Not enough money to afford the premiums easily but too much money to get subsidies.
SO this is just what the employer pays. The employee then pays premiums monthly as well for access. Employers pay somewhere between $5k and $25k (or more) per employee a year for health care depending on quality and portion of premiums they pay for the employee. Usually its split, so someone makes $80k a year, they pay $10k a year in premiums, employer pays $10k a year in premiums.
Born in Central Europe, I've never had a chance to watch The Computer Chronicles in my childhood. I've discovered them via twitch a few years ago and I adore the series.
If you look at AMD's CPUs there's indications they do that. When Zen1/1+/2 came out they were priced below intel's products as they needed to rebuild mindshare with their promising new chips, from Zen3 onwards where they started building a performance lead in many categories as well as core count they jacked the prices up because they could demand it.
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