We Should Have a Better Condom by Now

http://www.companiesandmarkets.com/MarketInsight/Consumer-Go...

claims that "The global condom industry has been forecast to hit a market value of US$5.4 billion by 2018". If you have the material science worked out you're mass producing a few grams of latex, selling to non-price sensitive customers, and can even market it as an "entertainment product" as the article states.

Kidney failure in a small set of patients. Typically urine/blood samples are taken for the first few months to check for this. There's some evidence of bone degradation in long term use (think 10+ years) but its mitigated with regular strength exercises. Beyond that not much else the formula has been altered a few times to make it pretty safe to take regularly.

Some people experience gastrointestinal distress from it but that usually passes after a month. If it doesn't they usually just stop taking it.

All of the side effects stop if you stop taking it.

[NSFW] http://thinhline.tumblr.com/post/5370750268/thl-7-nothing-i-...

The article touches the issue of sensitivity and the need to develop a condom that makes sex more enjoyable. So does the comic at the link above, if in a slightly different way.

In case of markets and products, one can rely on cynicism and economics. In case of sex, we should be able to rely on hedonism.

(Are there any other SL fans?)

This misses the point by a mile. Particularly for someone complaining about the article having too much unnecessary information, it's bizarre that you missed the ~3 paragraphs following this that describe _why_ it's a problem that they haven't changed: low rates of satisfaction and usage for something that has considerable public health implications (particularly in the developing world).

> Medical gloves (whose technology derives from condom manufacturing) haven't changed much for decades either.

....and if more than 50% of doctors weren't using medical gloves (regulation aside) due to evidently significant issues with comfort and convenience, this would be a cause for complaint too.

> The basic problem is that condoms work well enough for most people and so there isn't that much economic incentive to launch different kinds

This is a particularly ignorant claim, even if you hadn't read the article. Low rates of condom use in situations where they're extremely important is something that any informed person is aware of (again, this is most dramatically true for things like AIDS crises in developing countries like many in Sub-Saharan Africa). As the article establishes, usage isn't great even in the developing world:

"5 percent of men and 63 percent of women who’d most recently had sex with a “new acquaintance” hadn’t used a condom. More alarmingly, 75 percent of women who weren’t using a back-up birth control method reported not using a condom the last time they’d had sex. Adults who’d had anal sex in the past year—the highest-risk sexual act with regard to HIV transmission—said they’d used condoms only 20 percent of the time."

It should go without saying that economic incentives aren't a panacea for reaching global optima: Sometimes you end up in local optima, as in this case where the risk of doing research to potentially tap into the vast market of non-condom users may not be worth it. That's not to mention the systematic under-emphasis that economic incentives have on externalities, as in this case where the public health effects of more universal condom usage wouldn't all be captured by condom manufacturers.