JumpShift booths, Zap Guns and Politics?

I really like Larry Niven's jump shift booths. I want to walk down the street, step in a booth, and be somewhere else.

I love travel but getting to Europe takes so long you have to stay long enough to justify it. If I had a jump shift booth nearby I could hop to Madrid for tapas, Berlin for beer, and step to Korinthos for a night cap of retsina (partly to reconfirm my impression that people will drink anything to get a buzz.)

How would extremely fast travel affect life and politics?

If the world was down the block would we have the stupid foreign policies in this country? If you could just hop over and check out what the government or political parties say either about the facts or people's attitudes would there be a difference?

What brought this on was reading an Op-Ed in the NYTimes after recently rereading the Flight of the Horse collection. It looks like Kristof has been visiting his relatives in Spain and was surprised at how the world ignorance and arrogance of this administration has erased over thirty years of Spanish-American friendship. http://tinyurl.com/3flr7

I got to thinking, if people could walk down the block and suddenly be five thousand miles away how many people would still be ignorant of how the rest of the world lives and what they think?

Would out-sourcing be an issue if the world is a neighborhood? Would this lead to a rise in unions to protect the right to keep a job if it moved? Would international labor standards actually be established? If dissatisfied people willing to kill themselves could be in your neighborhood tomorrow what importance would society 1). place on security and 2). on eliminating roots of dissatisfaction?

Still, transfer booths, teleportation links, jumpshift booths, displacement booths, jump disks, whatever you call them, are the most magic-like of Larry's high-tech wonders.

The technology required seems beyond the singularity point, where just about everything in everyday life would be unexplainable, would seem like magic to us.

Like many SF concepts, teleportation seems more a metaphor of ever-decreasing travel times.

Somewhat related, I can't think of a single SF device or word for the increasingly powerful destructive devices 'individuals' can have as technology advances. Perhaps closest might be P, K. Dick's *Zap Gun*. I can't think of a SF name for something like a pocket or suitcase nuke. I believe it was Varley who had a "self-actualized " terrorist bomb in one story and John Barnes has advanced destructive weapons more easily acquired as elements in some books.

How do you deal with more common Zap Guns? Is Larry Niven's ARM, an all powerful world police force, the only answer?

There is a lot of evidence that the rate of scientific advancement depends on free trade and the free flow of ideas and peoples. Increasing security to deal with elements of scientific advancement - easier transportation, more destructive individual weapons - would slow this free flow down. Is this a prognosis for a slowing of the rate of tech advancement?

ARM seems created to deal with this type of threat and I have never liked ARM. Is that the most probable course of the future?