> The solar cost reduction numbers come in the form of reduced cost to manufacture and improved panel performance. There is a lot of non-Chinese research into the latter, but even in the former case a lot of inventions and technology is developed then licensed. USA and Germany.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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. What have been the crucial innovations in smartphones in the last ten years? I think you'll find that most of them came from China, though the M1 is designed in the US.

> Well the Chinese rocket program is basically repeating the rockets of the 60s.

Until a couple of years ago, the US couldn't even "repeat the rockets of the 60s"; it was relying on Soyuz to get its astronauts to the ISS. Reusable rockets themselves aren't a "new idea" on the timescales we're talking about here; the US tried that in the 70s and failed so badly it destroyed its entire manned spaceflight program. 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?

> Also we're talking about mainland China or the nation governed by the CCP here (the context was "China" catching up with "not China" in silicon manufacturing).

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.

> What's interesting about Padauk?

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

1. They use a second hardware thread on the same CPU (or, in theory, up to three of them) to do things like PWM, SPI, or quadrature decoding which are usually done in hardware (or, say, pioasm on the RP2040, or the tiny amount of programmable logic on some new Microchip AVRs). This means you aren't limited to the peripherals included on a particular chip; you can in theory do things like generate an NTSC signal while running application code, which is something I've sort of done on the ATMega328, but I had to settle for running application code during the HBI and VBI.

2. They cost less than many discrete signal transistors, so it's reasonable to use them where you would use a transistor. Harder to second-source tho.

They also invented their own programming language for the chips, an assembly language with C-like syntax, but I'm not that impressed with it.