I'm fine with being your little example of dodgy, overly complex explanations--particularly since your reasons for preferring it are basically that it can be read, as the kind of ideological obfuscation you'd like to say any complex explanation can be revealed as containing.
But let's be clear that I did mention that this is something I've gleaned from experience (i.e. it's "true" also in your terms), which is that all the buildings in which I live and work have these same characteristics and most were built at relatively the same moment in the same geographical area--some even contain identical fixtures and air conditioner convector units and similar layouts even though they are technically twenty or so miles apart. And in the few buldings like this that contain a few windows that can be opened, they are on the periphery of the building and therefore do little to circulate the air through the closed doors of the management and/or senior faculty that enjoy most of the windows and all of the rare opening windows.
For most of the building it is simply assumed that climate control and airconditioning will *always* be working therefore it is not necessary to try to design alternatives within the structure. I'm sure one could produce a variety of micro explanations for this design in each case, but I'm betting the cost benefit analysis wasn't done by a democratic vote and more than likely the options that were presented to the client had already been run through this kind of analysis by the people in charge of the development. The latter, I'm also betting, were based in no small part on cultural assumptions (which, I mention as separate from profits, even if they're related--a point you prefer to cover over with your own ideological understanding of what I said) about building design, as well as the costs of the design and the strictures of insurance companies, etc.
And in this case, once those decisions are made, choice is determined to making some difficult (and/or pricey) adjustment to the climate control system, running the air or trying to fashion some sequence of fans and open windows that got some cool air to the interior of the building without freezing the people sitting closest to them. Yes there are choices still available, but all of them are ad hoc and none of them are sure to solve the problem. But I don't think I'm being ideological (except in the sense that my ideology is in some part the result of my perception of material relations) or overly complicated by pointing out that the few bad choices available are determined to some extent by the building flaws which were, in part based on a technocratic beleif that these problems were already solved and creating alternatives would simply be a useless extra expense.
I'll also say that, it was sloppy of me to assume that Doug worked (in NY) in a building with similar attributes, just as it was sloppy of Jerry to ignore the fact that I was speaking from my own experience. I suppose in all those cases, I still have a choice and I should really reflect on myself more and ask why I continue to go to work even with these restrictive, ecologically damaging work environment--and why some days I even like it.
Incidentally, in your snarky reply about pleasure, ideology, and preferance, I'd say you are touching on most of the issues Zizek tries to explore in a more technical theory. In this, to answer a question you post later, the issues of pleasure and desire are central to the innovations made on Marx's more conventional "German Ideology" in that it tries to take into account how these mechanisms work through these institutions and why it feels so good to believe things that are so objectively wrong (niether of which Chomsky really gets at: basically, if you believe something else, you're just dumb or uninformed by the media, the elites, etc.)
On the other hand, the idea of hegemony tries to deal with the way that the dominant ideology is forced to adapt to change in order to continue to be applicable to obvious facts on the ground as well as the variety of social forces and power blocs vying for superiority. This is a more nuanced version which tries to take Marx's historical emphases seriously and explain why a particular ideology seems reasonable--not just based on the dominant logic of the time, but based on a historical struggle over, as Volosinov said, the multiaccentuality of the sign. In fact, I'd venture to guess that much of your understanding of what Marx means in these earlier texts is very much influenced by later thinkers who have tried to build on that idea and create a more technical term that can take into account it's changes, contradictions, and continuous constitution. Since it is an abstract concept that simultaneously has effects on both a given community and the individuals within it, this often leads to the development of a wide variety of concepts and discourses which are then used as tools in the formation of new concepts and discourses. Why you feel it would be better to scrap all of them and just pretend like there's nothing we need to discuss that can't be discussed in terms laid out 150 years ago is beyond me. It seems a bit staid.