—Hooray, America got its smaller government! Of those jobs, 345,000 disappeared in a year. But let's not even get into these August employment numbers, just released. Why bother? It's a long-term trend, the not-working, and that's the way they ("they"!) want it.

It should perhaps however be noted that the August report does some serious correction on the June and July reports: "The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised from +46,000 to +20,000, and the change for July was revised from +117,000 to +85,000." So yeah, strike those 58,000 jobs that weren't created this summer from the permanent record. Happy Labor Day.

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Guess what? This means England has surpassed its tragic colony, old Prisoncrime Island, in rates of imprisonment—with all of 22 million people, Australia has only like 30,000 people in prison. (Though they're trying desperately to up their rates!)

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• More than 3% of households that had job income in 2007 had none in 2009.

• America's average household income fell 13.7% from 2007 to 2009.

• Two million fewer people filed tax returns from 2007 to 2009.

Goodbye! America doesn't need you.

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"Paid digital subscribers": 224,000.

"Paid e-reader subscribers": 57,000.

Free digital subscribers ("paid for" by a sponsor): 100,000.

"Home-delivery subscribers with free linked digital accounts": 756,000.

So that's 1,037,000 people paying, in one way or another, to access the Times online, though the vast majority of them are actually paying for the physical newspapers, and getting the digital version for "free." (And what's more: a number of those are paying for just the weekend paper, not the daily paper.)

And "circulation" is down from 2011 to 2010. The Times puts it this way: "the rate of home-delivery circulation declines slowed moderately, as we observed an uptick in new home-delivery orders and a decrease in attrition following the launch as print subscribers of all frequencies receive all digital access at no additional cost." The use of the word "uptick" is funny there, given that the number of subscribers is, you know, on a decline. The point being: only a slightly fewer number of people actually stopped getting the paper, and also some started getting the paper (*raises hand!*), just so that they could get the paper "for free" online. Not terrible; this seems according to plan! The Times Company as a whole would technically be (or, you know, in the real world, "is") making about $28 million a month—if it weren't for all those pesky write-downs that dragged it way into the hole this quarter.

But saying, as the CEO did, that digital subscriptions will provide the company “with a significant new revenue stream in the second half of this year" seems like a pretty grand over-statement. 224,000 people at $15 a month is $3.36 million; at $35 a month, that's $7.8 million. You apparently can't even pay for the staff of About.com with that—and it costs ten times that last number to actually produce the physical paper.

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In short? Nothing has changed for the better and no one will change anything about the entirely busted system of work in America. Let's look back at our long national nightmare that should be a total scandal and yet kind of isn't because there's a new Transformers movie!

• June 2, 2011: "There were 422,000 new claims for unemployment benefits last week."

• February 4, 2011: "The actual number of people in the labor force is now smaller, by half a million people. So yes! Unemployment is down! Fewer people consider themselves workers."

• November 5, 2010: "There were 457,000 new unemployment claims last week. Your President is still advocating for the Congress to extend unemployment benefits for all the old, boring unemployed, much of the total mass of the official 14.8 million jobless, most of whom ran out or are going to soon run out of the unemployment insurance."

• September 3, 2010: "'The total number of unemployed people rose to 14.86 million in August from 14.59 million in July.' More of those 'census' jobs went away, 114,000 of them, and also 10,000 more non-federal government jobs. 'The number of people out of work for 27 weeks' is now only 6.2 million."

• August 6, 2010: "The official 'underemployment' rate stands at 16.5%: 'That's roughly double the figure in December 2007, when the recession began.'"

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So let's generously round off their active tracking to around 200 magazines. But that's a very small percentage of the country's magazines.

There are very roughly something like 10,000 magazines as of 2009 in the United States. 1500 of those are college or alumni magazines; about 1100 each are medical or "regional interest"; 500 are car magazines; 350 are construction-related; 250 are law-related; almost 800 are law magazines.

The vast majority of these are tiny. When you list just the top 100 magazines in America by circulation, you are already dipping into magazines with circulation below a million people. If you look back at 2006, a weirdly boomy time for new magazines (trying to capture "ethnic" markets and brides and the like), there were 15,000 or so magazines in the US and Canada.

So: are there more magazines? Fewer?

The answer is sort of "it doesn't matter." It's negligible. What isn't negligible is the shrinking of the industry itself, as a place of employment. There are pretty much the same number of magazines as there were in recent years, if you look at "recent years" being the last few decades, or more instead of less, but the industry itself is much smaller.

One datapoint that's helpful to look at is how nearly all magazines, big and small, made do with less. This look at staffing at Time and Newsweek from '83 to '05 says plenty.

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