[erichocean]

Lots of money, no idea what to do with it.

Simple: give dividends to stockholders.

Unfortunately, as I understand it, the peerless geniuses running our country make it (a) more expensive, tax-wise, to do, since the profit is taxed twice, and (b) make it difficult/expensive to even bring back foreign earnings so that it can be given to shareholders.

[SudarshanP]

Suppose there was a solution where google could spend 10 billion$ on getting guys on mechanical turk to perform microtasks to organize the knowledge graph and make 20 billion worth of knowledge for google in a year's time... would it make sense for google to spend the cash or are the tax laws so weird that it would make sense to still sit over the cash?