yeah, i think that has held true for me everywhere i've lived. the dogma is that industry/commerce rate discounts attract employers aka eCoNoMiC aCtiViTy while their consistent volume of usage makes up for the discount.

maybe there's some logic to the idea that a smaller group of high volume clients is easier to provide administrative support (connect/disconnect/outages/billing/communication) and infrastructure than a massive group of distinct low volume clients, and maybe i can get with that when it comes to things like waste disposal and sewage.... but when it comes to energy, especially fossil fuel energy and a scarcity of renewable capacity, i think electricty usage should be graduated: the more you use, the more your rates go up and marking those extra revenues for increasing renewable/non-fossil fuel capacity until there isn't scarcity. and definitely certain "industries" and "commercial" clients should pay penalties if they are for-profit and Part of the Problem.

these are all very milquetoast social democratic reforms, so of course they cannot even be mentioned in our free liberal democracy marketplace of ideas.

Did they die of not being able to use 4000 watts every hour of the day (which we've only been able to do for 80 years), or did they die of not having cool enough air (which we have been very capable of providing for 8000 years)?

We need to be wary of this logic of "we need the things that we have developed in the age of capitalism".

There is a difference between setting the AC unit to 65F and having the room at 65F. I have no problem with the former if it's the only way to maintain normal temperatures, but if it's the latter it's wasteful

or maybe their house is like a sieve

Good lord the house me, my parents, and my 3 siblings live in is complete disaster. The building started life in the mid to late 1800s... as a single floor funeral home with a crematorium in the basement. Then sometime it got rezoned to be a house, and expanded on so much that it became a two floor sorta two family home since it technically is two addresses (the first floor is house number and the 2nd floor is house number and a half, including the fact it has two electric meters, two gas meters, and so on), now the quality of these expansions wildly varies though mostly on the bad side, like on the level of we're sure it may just end up being cheaper to just tear it down and build a new house than spend forever (and money we don't have) chasing all the issues it has.

Now, I mentioned that my mom and sister can't stand temps below a certain point, during winter due to again probably the quality of the expansions, my room just holds onto heat all the time, meanwhile my mom's room and sister's room seem to not exactly hold onto heat very well. You can start seeing where the problems start creeping up. So that window unit is pretty much the only thing keeping my room at a semi regular temperature during both summer and winter.

No, not really. Let's take another example. Let's say the average building height in NYC is increasing year over year. Some buildings are going to be higher than that average. You wouldn't say this building is higher than could be explained by the increase in average height because the increase in average height is NOT an explanation.

The decreasing value of the dollar is not an explanation causing price increases. Price increases IS the decreasing value of the dollar. The price of some commodities increasing faster than other commodities is exactly what we would expect during inflationary periods.

It's not like there's some number that is "the value of the dollar" and it changes in an objective way that businesses need to adapt to by raising prices. The value of the dollar is literally defined by the prices of things.