Yo OP, if you're still around, would you mind moving this thread to the Mining board? Thanks.
1) If you add up all the gains from mining, and subtract all the costs, you think this number will be greater than zero?
If the power efficiency of your rig is great enough to overcome the difficulty of the blocks and gain enough moneys' worth of bitcoins to cover the cost of the electricity to hurdle the variably-difficult block, and then some, the answer will in fact be yes. Obviously, the asic is power efficient enough to do this yet the GPU no longer is. The difficulty will keep rising the more asics people put to work, and therefore the money everyone gets out of the whole ordeal will keep going down until the difficulty is too high for the typical asic to get money out of it. The money that comes out of it has to do with the price of the bitcoin, which has to do with the popularity of bitcoin, which also affects the number of people trying to mine. Everything is interwoven to affect the difficulty of blocks and if you want to mine you will, in some way, have to predict how long your miner will be able to make money. The speed of your miner is completely irrelevant, mind you, that's only relevant to the amount of money you gain or lose, not
if you gain or lose it.
TL;DR: It depends on your mining rig.