How the difficulty is still going up, I don't understand.. If I had to pay for electricity, I wouldn't be mining right now. But I have free electricity. 
Because it's not home miners! Home miners are completely insignificant now and have been for the past several months. The hashrate is going up because ASIC manufacturers build for themselves and stock their miners in massive datacenters. And they aren't paying residential electric rates.
Yup, and the closer the cost of mining gets to BTC earned, the higher the desperation of the large farms to convert BTC as fast as poss to pay mining costs, thus putting enormous pressure on the BTC exchange rate driving the value downward, which pushes the cost of mining closer to break even, and repeat the process above - more pressure to turn over BTC, driving value downward etc etc.
There is a certain level of fiduciary irresponsibility at play here with some big operations, with others, its clear to me they are a tax write off who have little concern with the cost of mining.