Business schmisiness

So I am strongly leaning towards a career in industry after graduation and not one in academics. My experience so far of academic research has shown it to be focused on nitpicky (and, in my opinion, generally irrelevant) details and not on achieving functional products that actually help progress humanity. It also seems that most of a professor's time is spent answering to people that have given him/her or will possible give him/her money; although I understand why this is necessary I honestly have no desire to live a life like that. Industry research seems much more focused on useful products (obviously since they must in some way be marketable) and the decisions about where the money comes from is left to people who are interested in those details. While I realize that there is a significant trade-off between the two, with academics being more free to choose their own path than industry researchers, I am not sure that I need/want that sort of freedom in my life right now (or in the near future). This is not to say that I am completely dismissing the idea of an academic career at any point but at the moment I feel as though the negatives of such a job outweight the positives.

With this in mind, I have begun looking into possible companies that would provide me with the sort of career that I want. Interestingly enough, it seems that business consulting firms have the tendancy to hire PhDs in a wide variety of disciplines to perform many interesting research tasks. While it seems odd to join a company that is predominantly focused on business in order to do science, that does seem to be the way in which the world is heading. In many respects, this is not all that odd; Honda is one of the leading sources of robotics research in the world and yet their prime business is unrelated to that field (at least not directly related at this time).

On a different note, today's prediction for the future is that we will see a dramatic rise in gas prices after the November elections (within a few weeks) regardless of their outcome. If I had to place a number on it, I would say at least $0.30 and more like around $0.50 or more. I hope that this prediction is wrong because if it is right, I do not like the implications that it entails.