The collapse of the dot-com frenzy has spelled trouble for Amazon.com. In January, Amazon laid off 1,300 people, closed one of its warehouses, and put some of its new office space in the Union Station complex up for sublease. Now the Puget Sound Business Journal reports that Amazon has backed out of its lease for the new PacMed building. Regular ETS! readers will remember that Wright Runstad negotiated a cushy 100-year lease of the PacMed tower on Beacon Hill for a measly $1 million, then turned around and subleased the property to Amazon.com. Then, with the city's blessing (and some help from their old developer friend, Mayor Paul Schell), Wright Runstad clearcut the property to make way for a new PacMed building to house Amazon's expansion. That new building is now on hold, while WR looks around for new tenants, but the prospect of finding any takers is slim. So those old, stately cedar, Douglas fir, and sequoia trees that formerly occupied the now-bare site were sacrificed for nothing. It makes me wish I was a hacker--not of trees, but of commercial websites...--Maria Tomchick

Meanwhile, PacMed, which was chartered as a Public Development Authority by the city of Seattle, with the specific mission to provide health care for poor folks, is rapidly going bankrupt. PacMed operates 12 clinics in the Seattle area, but is being forced to shut down 6 of them. The main culprits are below-cost federal government payments for Medicare and Medicaid patients (remember this when you get your tax refund check in the mail) and the common practice of global capitation. "Global capitation" is when insurers negotiate a standard monthly fee for all members of a plan and PacMed has to provide all medical services to those members for that fee.

With rising drug and supply costs, rising salaries for doctors and nurses, and the expense of treating patients that can't get preventive care from their insurance company (and who smoke, drink, don't exercise, eat a crappy diet, and don't go see the doctor till they're very, very sick), PacMed is rapidly going under. Of course, if the city had demanded that Wright Runstad pay something close to market value for the old PacMed tower, there might be some money left over to float the PacMed clinics. Priorities, priorities.--M.T.

The industry newsletter Utility Forecaster points out that not everyone will lose because of California's energy crisis. In fact, some folks will benefit twice. For example, Duke Energy, which made money selling power to California at astronomical prices earlier this year, is on track to make even more money from the crisis. The California state legislature and other state legislatures (including our own) are now debating tax incentives and other perks for companies that want to build new power plants in their states. Duke Energy is ready to jump in and start construction. According to the Utility Forecaster, Duke and other private utility companies "will reap windfall gains that will make recent shortage-driven profits look paltry." The states should quit agonizing about "the market" and build their own publicly-owned power generators. It may be too late for California, which has just used a huge portion of its borrowing capacity to bail out bankrupt local utilities, but it's not too late for us. Why not a "Washington Public Windpower Supply System?"--M.T.

Farmers and consumers aren't the only important links in the coffee trade. The migratory songbirds, the thrushes and warblers and tanagers and orioles that summer in the Pacific Northwest, spend their winters in the forested highlands of southern Mexico and Central America--coffee country. Shade coffee farms provide a significant amount of habitat for these birds. But intensive agricultural methods, employing a multitude of fertilizers and pesticides, enable coffee bushes to be grown without shading trees, for more yield and more unsustainable profit per acre. The songbirds increasingly return to their southern haunts to find the trees gone. As go the trees, so go the songbirds.

As the pest-eating songbirds decline, the number of local crop-destroying insects increase, both here and there. This enforces a greater use of pesticides, which kill more young birds. The threat of extinction in every cup. Buy fair trade, shade grown coffee. The Seattle Audubon Society is promoting its Northwest Shade Coffee Campaign at www.seattleaudubon.org or 206-523-8243.--Troy Skeels

Don't eat these shorts... workers at Orlando's Disney World have, after two months of union negotiating, won the right to have clean undergarments. Workers who wear the costumes of the various Mouse Empire characters previously had to leave the entire costume, including jock straps, tights, or bike shorts (regular underwear bunches up and is noticeable), at the job when went home at night, and pick up a different set the next day. After numerous complaints of, among other things, pubic lice and scabies, the poor workers can now take their shorts home to clean them themselves.--Geov Parrish

Q: "An American President, a British Prime Minister, and the President of Italy are stranded in the Australian outback. Who will be the first to die?"

A: "An Iraqi infant." --G.P.