Amazons downtown...
Amazon's downtown... Charles Mudede

And so we find in the 21st century that the Amazon rain forest is decreasing as the Amazon e-commerce and cloud computing corporation continues to increase. In fact, there are models that predict the former will become a desert when the world has been completely transformed by global warming. Where will the other Amazon be in that terrible future? Today, the news from Wall Street is that the Seattle-based cyberspace zaibatsu will buy Whole Foods Market for $13.4 billion. This is big news for retailers in and outside of the virtual realms. It will excite markets around the world.

The value of Whole Foods shares on Wall Street have "rocketed 28 percent." That is to say, they are leaving earth and entering the orbit that the late French philosopher of post-modernism, simulacra and simulation Jean Baudrillard described in his brief essay "Transeconomics" as:

...the mass of floating money whirling about the Earth in an orbital rondo. Money is now the only genuine artificial satellite. A pure artifact, it enjoys a truly astral mobility; and it is instantaneously convertible. [It is] the orbit in which it rises and sets like some artificial sun…
Amazon has long been in this orbit. And though much of its market capitalization (half a trillion dollars and rising) is nothing but fictional, it has real consequences on Earth, on the street, on the man and woman walking on the street.

Seattle's reality is being distorted by speculation on shares and speculation on property values. And though homes or apartment buildings are very much on the ground, it is possible their values will reach escape velocity and enter orbit. This is surely the case with Vancouver B.C.. And once they are up there, it's hard for them to come down again. Even the force of a 15 percent tax can't bring them down. More must be done. Like a planet in a science-fiction movie, soon two more suns will rise and fall over Seattle: that of Amazon's shares and that of its property prices. To see them, you will have look up and squint your eyes.