> It's come entirely in the form of reduced cost to manufacture; mainstream solar panels have been about 21% efficient and low-cost ones about 16% efficient for decades. Thin-film panels have gotten a lot more efficient over the last 10 years, but they've also been completely eclipsed by traditional silicon panels.

There have been significant gains in commercial cells even over the past 10 years. https://www.nrel.gov/pv/module-efficiency.html

> Can you name one or two inventions that have been important in reducing silicon PV manufacturing costs in the last 10 years that originated in the US and Germany? I can't.

Yes, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021... LeTID problems in PERC panels were comprehensively examined and solutions found by these researchers. The parent company is South Korean (also not Chinese), but PERC was one of the biggest jumps in efficiency of cells in the past 10 years.

> I'm confused about why you're bringing up the original invention of things like smartphones (arguably Finland and Japan in the 01990s, rather than Danger in the US, but there's been continuous development), and jet engines.

Everything is built on other things, but still you can see significant advances. By smartphone I'm not referring to cellular radios or batteries or computer chips (all of which themselves build on other things), but the invention that revolutionizes a technology. The iPhone. I'm aware there are things people claim are smartphones before that, but that's not what I'm talking about.

> I agree with you that 40 or 70 years ago the US was inventing a lot more things than China was; 40 years ago China was still largely Communist. 1000 years ago China was doing more; the Song had a paper-money-based fossil-fuel mass-production economy administered by a centralized bureaucracy. 2500 years ago the center of innovation was Greece and India.

And today US is still inventing a lot more things than China was.

> But I thought we were talking about a much shorter timescale here: where are things being invented now, like, the last ten years. And the US definitely didn't invent jet engines or smartphones in the last ten years.

My point with jet engines is that China is incapable of developing them independently after 70 years of effort and with the luxury of having samples of good jet engines to copy for the entire time.

> What have been the crucial innovations in smartphones in the last ten years?

iPhone is near enough (I never mentioned 10 years, just general modern).

> I think you'll find that most of them came from China, though the M1 is designed in the US.

Which of them of them came from China? Not software, not silicon manufacturing, not digital logic design, not LTE modems, not screens, not new NAND technologies, not cameras. So what is the "most of them" that exceeds those things?

> Until a couple of years ago, the US couldn't even "repeat the rockets of the 60s";

Of course it could.

> it was relying on Soyuz to get its astronauts to the ISS.

A matter of funding, the rocket technology did not go away obviously they still maintain ICBMs and SLBMs.

> Reusable rockets themselves aren't a "new idea" on the timescales we're talking about here;

No, I'm talking about inventing an actual working reusable rocket and all the technologies and inventions required to achieve that.

> the US tried that in the 70s and failed so badly it destroyed its entire manned spaceflight program.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but a lot changes in 50 years. 70s was only a decade after the first manned space flight.

> Presumably SpaceX has been able to succeed at this in part due to coming up with some genuinely new ideas; do you have any idea what they are or where they came from?

Certainly not China, which (yet again) is following and copying.

It's an American company though, with very strong restrictions on who can work for them (non-citizens / permanent residents I thin are not allowed).

> If you want to start talking about that, I guess you're free to, but I have no interest in starting to talk about that subject.

This is what the conversation is about. Read the thread, it started from wondering about whether China will catch up in silicon manufacturing. That does not make any sense if you count China as including Taiwan does it?

All my comments apply to mainland China.

> Padauk's CPUs (another Taiwanese company, by the way, in case you're keeping track) have two particularly interesting innovations:

I'm not sure what is innovative about what you're describing as hardware multi threading or software DSP but I'll take your word for it there's probably more to it that I'm not understanding. Still, they're also not mainland China, not surprisingly.

Also, it is not very generous to describe something like this as innovation but at the same time say that iPhone was not innovative.

You also don't address any of the rebuttals I made to other things (e.g., RISC-V, crypto, AI, GPUs). Does that mean you concede on those points?