Don't know if you guys have heard but apparently there is a fork coming up on New Years Day to delay the Ice age once again. For some reason I have no idea why they decided to make a hard-fork on a holiday which is celebrated in most of the world. They had issues with this before when they made a testnet launch on a weekend and they ran into issues since many devs took the weekend off. Most likely same will happen on New Years day with all the devs being hung over or passed out instead of watching the fork and taking action if there are any issues.
Anyways its going to bring the block times back to 13 seconds because we are currently at 17 seconds according to,
https://etherscan.io/chart/blocktimeSo it should make mining slightly more profitable than currently which is record low mining profitability levels since maybe 2015.