And there was me thinking price fixing was illegal

Following the big bru-ha-ha immediately after the withdrawal of universal healthcare for the over 70s, The government were told that any deal they made with doctors in relation to a reduction of charges for over 70s would constitute price fixing.

Doctors associations could not negotiate on behalf of doctors, who in essance were self employed.

Move forward a few months to this week and we hear that boozers are to institute a price freeze for the next twelve months.

So, why are doctors not allowed to collectively determine their prices, but publicans are?  Isn’t price fixing supposed to be illegal?

In the event it doesn’t see the light of day on Something.ie

Well the comment I posted last week is still awaiting moderation

Response to this post

Something.ie did not get permission to publish my work on their site.

Leeched, leeched, leeched, leeched.

The work belongs to me, and Limerickblogger.org, and authorised agrigators are permitted to distribute it.

 UPDATE: It appears that moves are afoot to undo the problems I have had with this website.  The Leader content is being attributed to the Limerick Leader and so on.

I still have an issue though, although it no longer affects me as it once did, with the original posts of bloggers not being linked through the story headline on Something.ie  On the site, you have to click on the authors name to get to the original content.

I do not, and never have, contributed to something.ie

Not one to go jumping on the band-wagon here, but a post on mulley.net, and mamanpoulet.com relating to the website something.ie prompted me to write this after having a cursory look at the site.

Releases by the Limerick Leader newspaper which appear on the something.ie website are NOT being submitted by me.

For the record, I have never written a post for, or given permission to something.ie

In the past, something.ie scraped posts from a site I used to own called limerickblogger.org.  I never gave permission for them to use any content from that site on their own site.  The amount of trackbacks from something.ie at the time resulted in me marking the phrase something.ie as a blacklisted phrase so as to stop between five and ten spammy emails coming to my inbox every day.

Now, as you can see from the image above, they are attributing content that wasn’t even written by me, to me.

The Workplace Equipment Adaptation Grant

This has been in operation for a while, however, yours truly only became aware of it after several recruitment agencies would respond to the revalation that one has a visual impairment with “hmm, I don’t know about that, followed two days later by by the PFO.

Anyway, returning to the subject at hand. it is FÁS who administer this grant for anyone who succeeds in gaining employment in the private sector if they have a disability.

This can include the installation of wheelchair accessible toilets, ramps, amplified telephones, or computers with speech or magnification software installed. The grant can also be applied for if someone with a disability has been working in the private sector for a while and requires their accessibility equipment to be upgraded, for example, if an employer decided to upgrade the operating system on their computer network, a new version of Lunar or Hal might be required.

Either the employer or the employee can apply for the grant by printing and filling out the forms linked below. These forms are then submitted to the local FÁS office for processing.

In the case of both Lunar and Hal, a 30 day evaluation period of the aforementioned software packages is available to downloa should you need to use it immediately. This should hopefully tide you over until such time FÁS has processed your application.

VAT can also be reclaimed by the employer when they have filled out the second linked form below.

Workplace Equipment Adaptation Grant application form (PDF Format)

Reclamation of VAT form (PDF Format)

Hello world!

Well, it is only right that a blog should have a “Hello World” post.

I suppose I’d better introduce myself. A lot would know me as the creator of LimerickBlogger.org, a site which create one miserable December day in 2005, and which grew to such an extent that I finally decided it was time to put it into the hands of someone who could make it reach it’s tre potential.

The site was an idea, and a good one, although I am not an expert on keeping a good idea running.

Ithink blogging is a good and constructive passtime, done properly it can get your ideas and views into the public arena where normally you would be prevented from doing so by either time constraints or space constraint in the mainstream media. It can also help to practice skills like tping and spelling.

But I would much prefer to write maybe one or two posts a day, rather than the five to ten posts per day I was writing on the Limerick Blogger. Then there was the endless scouring of newspapers, news bulletins, websites, press releases, a unmoderated comments which were taking up more and more of my time.

This will be my personal blog. It will have more to do with my interests than what goes oi MIGHT EVEN n in this city of Limerick. With Limerick Blogger you would get bogged down and despondent after reading four or five weeks of arson attacks, drive by shootings, dodgy court reporting, and the like. There will be none of that here.

This will be my space. where I can share things like my views on the movies I have collected ver the years, and the type of music i LIKE. i might even throw in a few political views just to keep my friends at Stormfront wound up. Nothing beats getting them white supremacists angry.

Anyway That is me pretty much in a nutshell.

Oh, as for the name “In the Little Smoke” well that is a reference to Limerick. Ireland’s capital, Dublin, is known a The Big Smoke, and being much smaller than Dublin, but still being a city, it seemed appropriate to call the site “In The Little Smoke.”