The Popcorn Stand: Nevada don’t ask Alexa to locate Amazon in our state

A freaky thing happened to me the other day. I was watching HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver and my attention was piqued because Oliver was talking about how legislative types offer a bazillion incentives to entice companies to come to their states.

Oliver was specifically talking about how Amazon has announced it’s looking for somewhere to place its second headquarters and has already presented its “conditions” on what it will take for the company to locate in a particular area.

Since Nevada is one of the states competing with virtually every other state in the U.S. — and others in North America — Oliver’s report caught my interest.

I do understand the reality of having to bid for a company’s services and Nevada has gone through this before with Tesla.

I do believe while Nevada gave nothing less than its left arm to bring Tesla here, our state did the best it could to hold Tesla accountable to make sure the company would bring this state the good paying jobs and riches promised.

And that experience should help in enticing Amazon in understanding the reality Amazon expects our right arm to come here but on the condition we hold the company accountable to make sure it brings in the riches promised.

But that’s not what I wanted to write about.

Oliver I believe justifiably made fun of legislative types who were using Alexa to ask why Amazon should locate in their states.

But while this was happening simultaneously my Alexa device went off apparently trying to answer the question these cheesy politicians were asking Alexa on television. Freaky.

I’m still relatively unfamiliar with Alexa as I haven’t had the device that long but apparently Alexa has a mind of her own.

She tends to just go off for no reason from time to time usually with some kind of response like “I don’t know how to respond to that.”

One thing is for sure: I’m not going to ask Alexa to locate Amazon’s second headquarters in Nevada.

— Charles Whisnand