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This is The Sausage's daily look at what the people who actually know what they're talking about blogged today. You can see the introductory post here.

Brad DeLong
Took the day off.

Paul Krugman
Took the day off.

Last week, TBM spotlighted Target (TGT) and its philanthropic activity on Facebook. The company was letting Facebook users vote on how it should give away $3 million, the estimated amount it said it donates to charity every week.

Careful—or sex-obsessed—readers might notice that TBM and our sister site Slate have separate stories about sex on Craigslist, and, frankly, depending on which one you read you might end up with a very different idea of whether Craigslist has dropped its ads for paid sex. Melissa Grant's story in Slate today makes the cogent and I think very valid point that Craigslist's ads make prostitution safer for both the sex workers and their clients.

Since the Paulson days, it's been clear that this financial crisis in particular is a complex and unpredictable beast. So much so that Treasury can never seem to stick to its original plan.

First we had Paulson saying that the TARP would be used to buy up toxic assets. Then we had him saying that on second thought, the banks needed direct injections of money more than they needed us to absorb their assets. Then the Federal Reserve got involved with different loan programs, and nobody really knew what we were doing to save the banks, only that we were ostensibly trying our best.

Even before the Twitter phenomenon exploded into a full-blown fad last fall, fans and detractors alike have been wondering the same thing: How exactly are they going to make money? We’ve long been told that advertising wasn’t going to be Twitter’s answer. As late as Monday of last week, founder Biz Stone said publicly that the site wasn’t pursuing advertising as a source of revenue, according to a report from CNet.

Life is a series of existential questions once NFL players hang up the cleats. How can I recapture the rush of being in front of millions of fans every Sunday? How can I make my head stop hurting from all these concussions? Now what am I going to do for a living?

The answer for one former player: enter the world of finance.

It's time we stop thinking that people in charge of the financial system actually know what's happening inside the financial system. In Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis told us that there was a purposeful ignorance amongst Salomon Brothers brass in the '80s regarding these newfangled things called mortgage-backed securities. "The executive committee members of Salomon Brothers decided the mortgage market was bad news.

In an article posted today, the Wall Street Journal bemoans the decline of genuine bling jewelry. The lament spends roughly 1,000 words—and far too many melting-ice puns—amplifying the complaints of celebrity artisans who are crying poverty (or maybe just crying) over a decline in sales of high-quality bling.

There's an amorphous, invisible force that floats around Washington, D.C., wafting in and out of the halls of power. Around the city it's referred to by its initials—CW—as though it were the pass code to a secret club of suit-sagged politicos; the very politicos who mold and shape the CW into what it is and what everybody talks about.

Matthew Crawford's feature in the New York Times last week argues that the working world has discarded its cubicle structure in favor of hands-on careers in manufacturing and labor.

Regular readers of TBM have probably realized that this blog, the Sausage, has become a playground of odds and ends. It's where the writers and editors of this site deposit their loose string, the thoughts that don't merit a full 800-1,200 words but do merit a riff or two. Or if we're not riffing, we're following up on stories we've already written, sometimes featuring reader commentary.

What the Sausage has most certainly not been is a blog. For the next two weeks, that's going to change.