New York state wants its sales tax on all those items you bought online, out of state or on an Indian reservation. For years, you were supposed to cough up this sales tax by completing a form and mailing it with a check to the state. ...

Thirteen states have a separate line on their income tax returns, according to a 2002 survey by the Federation of Tax Administrators. Four states and the District of Columbia mail residents a separate form.

Well, that's news to me. Apparently, the idea is that the businesses themselves don't have to deal with it because the Supreme Court said it would be a burden for them to have to deal with loads of different state laws. Why I have to deal with it is unclear to me ... call it a "sales" tax or a "use" tax or a "gouge me out of a few more dollars" tax if you'd like, but the net effect is that you are taxing stuff that came from out of state. I don't think it should be legal to interfere with interstate commerce like this, unless you are Congress. Congress is talking about figuring out how to streamline the system so the Internet businesses can be charged sales taxes, which is fine by me. States doing it the way they do it now seems wrong to me. The tax itself was trivial in my case; the principle, not so much.

Anyway, I do like to go shopping online and elsewhere for various items, which is probably the case for some thing or other for most people out there. Two places that appeal to me are bookstores and food stores. The best food stores are big supermarkets that have a range of interesting foods and health/natural food stores that do so as well along with a better range of vegetarian/vegan products. One product that I purchased a few times at such a store was hemp food ... for instance, hemp flavored cereal or frozen waffles.

The problem is that there is a fear that the hemp would have traces amounts of THC, the stuff that makes you high in pot (yes, hemp as in rope comes from the same plant family), which is pretty ridiculous. An appeals court thought so too, striking down a DEA ban of hemp foods because it held "non-psychoactive hemp products" not covered by the law in question. Meanwhile, no major attempts to ban caffeine rich cola drinks that children guzzle down daily seem to be in the works. Of course, the court in question is the Ninth, so the "oh them" comments are being made, as if all of the thousands of decisions made by them are ridiculous and/or going to be struck down by the Supreme Court, which hands down about eighty decisions (and a few more summary opinions) a year. Oh well.