And mental health.

Oh yeah I’ve heard some commentators talking about the debt brake before, and how some are pushing to do away with it. It didn’t occur to me that military spending would specifically be the sticking point there.

They are strong enough that they’re able to block increased defense spending together with the AfD

Does Germany have some rules that defence spending requires a 2/3rds supermajority or something? Linke and AfD cannot stop anything on their own if a simple majority is required. The Union and SPD have a slim majority between them, and add the Greens and you’ve got an extremely strong majority.

In parliamentary democracies, the “government” is the term used for the ruling party or coalition. Even more specifically, it’s used for the Ministers. It’s a more specific term than just referring to all elected representatives sitting in the parliament (the Bundestag, in the case of Germany, or maybe the Bundestag & Bundesrat). Comparing it to the American system, “government” is somewhat analogous to the “executive”—the President and Cabinet Secretaries—except that it’s a fuzzy term and can also mean the non-ministerial members of parliament who are allied with the ministers.

So the AfD will not be a part of the Government because both the CDU/CSU and SPD have placed a cordon sanitaire around the AfD. They refuse to work with them because they view them as dangerous extremists. It would be theoretically possible for the CDU/CSU to break that cordon and form a government between just their party and the AfD, or they can form a traffic light coalition with the SPD and Green party. The latter seems more likely, given recent German political history.

It’s a win for the party, but a win for the party is different from winning the election.

In the last Australian federal election, the Greens quadrupled their number of seats. It was absolutely a huge win for the Greens. But going from 0.7% of seats to 2.6% cannot mean you “won” the election. (Also…wow…that shows just how gross single winner elections are. Even with preferential voting. When a party that consistently gets over 10% of the votes is able to win less than 3% of seats and call that a huge win. Proportional systems like Germany’s MMP are amazing!)

Whether you want to say the CDU/CSU “won” the German election, IMO, depends less on how their vote changed relative to the last election, and more on whether you want to say the party that ends up selecting the Chancellor “won” an election, even if they need to go into a three party coalition. My personal take is that yes, it’s not unreasonable to say they won.

This argument doesn’t make sense. Even if you do accept that NATO is not purely defensive because of what happened in Libya, blaming NATO for Russia invading another country that isn’t in NATO makes as much sense as me blaming my brother John for the fact that my other brother Robert was beating his wife, and then violently taking it out on John.

And that’s ignoring the reason NATO is expanding. It expands when new countries decide they want to join it. And countries at present are wanting to join it because they feel threatened by Russia. The reason for its expansion is Russia’s aggression, so to turn back and blame NATO for Russia’s aggression is completely backwards.

This comes literally the day after the Greens announced the same policy. This is excellent news and good policy. It shows that even when they don’t win, voting for the Greens is a good move, because it demonstrates the strength of progressive beliefs in this country, and forces Labor to listen to the left.

Honestly I can’t even figure out how to get that alpine-chrome image to work. I edited my Dockerfile to say

FROM zenika/alpine-chrome:with-puppeteer

instead of

FROM node:22

I tried changing USER node to USER chrome. I removed all the apt-get dependencies that were needed to get Puppeteer working in Docker on my PC in the first instance, and added --chown=chrome to my COPY package.json line, all as described in the with-puppeteer example. I also added the ENV lines from that. (I also tried various combinations of some of the aforementioned changes but not others.) Now I get an error with the npm install step.

15.44 npm ERR! code 1
15.44 npm ERR! path /usr/src/app/node_modules/canvas
15.44 npm ERR! command failed
15.44 npm ERR! command sh -c prebuild-install -r napi || node-gyp rebuild
15.45 npm ERR! prebuild-install warn install No prebuilt binaries found (target=7 runtime=napi arch=x64 libc=musl platform=linux)
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info it worked if it ends with ok
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info using node-gyp@8.4.1
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info using node@20.15.1 | linux | x64
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info find Python using Python version 3.11.10 found at "/usr/bin/python3"
15.45 npm ERR! gyp http GET https://nodejs.org/download/release/v20.15.1/node-v20.15.1-headers.tar.gz
15.45 npm ERR! gyp http 200 https://nodejs.org/download/release/v20.15.1/node-v20.15.1-headers.tar.gz
15.45 npm ERR! gyp http GET https://nodejs.org/download/release/v20.15.1/SHASUMS256.txt
15.45 npm ERR! gyp http 200 https://nodejs.org/download/release/v20.15.1/SHASUMS256.txt
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn /usr/bin/python3
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args [
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '/usr/src/app/node_modules/node-gyp/gyp/gyp_main.py',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   'binding.gyp',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-f',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   'make',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-I',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '/usr/src/app/node_modules/canvas/build/config.gypi',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-I',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '/usr/src/app/node_modules/node-gyp/addon.gypi',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-I',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '/home/chrome/.cache/node-gyp/20.15.1/include/node/common.gypi',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dlibrary=shared_library',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dvisibility=default',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dnode_root_dir=/home/chrome/.cache/node-gyp/20.15.1',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dnode_gyp_dir=/usr/src/app/node_modules/node-gyp',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dnode_lib_file=/home/chrome/.cache/node-gyp/20.15.1/<(target_arch)/node.lib',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dmodule_root_dir=/usr/src/app/node_modules/canvas',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Dnode_engine=v8',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '--depth=.',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '--no-parallel',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '--generator-output',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   'build',
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args   '-Goutput_dir=.'
15.45 npm ERR! gyp info spawn args ]
15.45 npm ERR! Package pixman-1 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
15.45 npm ERR! Perhaps you should add the directory containing `pixman-1.pc'
15.45 npm ERR! to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
15.45 npm ERR! Package 'pixman-1', required by 'virtual:world', not found
15.45 npm ERR! gyp: Call to 'pkg-config pixman-1 --libs' returned exit status 1 while in binding.gyp. while trying to load binding.gyp
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! configure error
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack Error: `gyp` failed with exit code: 1
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack     at ChildProcess.onCpExit (/usr/src/app/node_modules/node-gyp/lib/configure.js:259:16)
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack     at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:519:28)
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! stack     at ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:294:12)
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! System Linux 6.10.14-linuxkit
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! command "/usr/bin/node" "/usr/src/app/node_modules/.bin/node-gyp" "rebuild"
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! cwd /usr/src/app/node_modules/canvas
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! node -v v20.15.1
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! node-gyp -v v8.4.1
15.45 npm ERR! gyp ERR! not ok
15.45
[+] Running 0/1A complete log of this run can be found in: /home/chrome/.npm/_logs/2025-02-18T01_04_35_846Z-debug-0.log
 - Service node  Building                                                                                         18.9s
failed to solve: process "/bin/sh -c npm install" did not complete successfully: exit code: 1