From what I have read, scrum methods lend themselves to the notion of disposable production teams. "Get it done, do it fast, see you later!" They want short-term hires to come in, "work some magic" and then disappear from their payroll system when they are done. They want to reduce the "overhead" of middle management and other leadership roles

Agile and Scrum don't work with the above. One of the main principles is a stable development team. If you take short term hires try to assemble them into a Scrum team, then blow that team up and start over again you are screwed. (Scrum buzzords follow) You then have to rediscover velocity every time, you have to rediscover planning poker, and you never accumulate the experience and team trust that allows one to just rely on people to know what needs to be done and to brig problems to the attention of the group and leadership when needed.

It does reduce the overhead of middle management roles in particular Project Managers who are constantly scrambling around preparing schedules that end up not fitting reality, presentation about how everything is moving according to the fake schedule, and finally shortly before code delivery telling management why the due date will not be met, and giving the next fake delivery date.

I think it works if you understand what it is and what it is not. Scrum is more about project management than coding practices. It is primarily focused on addressing the fact that the Waterfall methodology is build on information the is mostly wrong. Yet, assumes that information is right. Scrum and Agile in general is about accepting that the information is bad and dealing with it. Man-hour estimates at the beginning of a project are always wrong. Schedules at the beginning of a project are always wrong. Requirements always change from what is documented.

Now the above can and should be combined with other Agile practices like Pair programming, test driven development, continuous integration and test, etc... for the coding side. And, the thing that I would not be surprised that many organizations miss which is the retrospective. My team does two week sprints and at the end of every two weeks we have to look at what worked and what did not. And, so over time we can accumulate a process that works for us.

Bringing this around to the OPs question we have actually switched who handles the Scrum Master role a couple of times trying to figure out what would work better. And, I am not sure that we have settled on the "right" solution, yet.

What about gods who think they are tech types?

"When some one asks if you are a god you say, YES!" - Winston

Actually, the LHC creates a set of circumstances that happens all the time. It just doesn't happen if front of very sensitive particle detectors at a very high rate. So, the LHC was built to replicate events that happen all the time in front of sensitive instrumentation.

So, yes, the LHC calculations could be somewhat off, but we have observations (not calculations) of events with much higher energies than the LHC can reach with cosmic rays hitting the earth's atmosphere and we are all still here. Jupiter is much bigger, so many more of those events occur on Jupiter. The sun is even bigger and many more high energy events occur for cosmic rays hitting the sun.

The calculations for LHC safety for micro black holes come from trying to put a number on the probability that if these events can destroy a planet by creating a black hole what is the probability that the Sun, Jupiter or any other planet in the Solar System would still exist given the number of high energy LHC-like events that have occurred over the last 4.5 billion years. The probability must be incredibly small, what the LHC calculations do is put a value to incredibly small.

From a doing the best thing for the athletes I think there is something to be said for the age rule giving more athletes the opportunity to compete in the Olympics

Assuming an advantage occurs at an age between 10-14 and that it is likely a girl will grow out of that advantage through puberty it creates a very narrow window within which a gymnast may compete at an Olympic medal level. It is entirely possible that with a bad birth year a gymnast might not be good enough to make the Olympics when the Olympics occur because their 2 year peak was between Olympic years.

I think an argument can be made that the 16 year rule gives the best gymnasts a chance to compete in the Olympics at least once if not twice in their career on a level playing field with others of similar maturity. I think without that rule there is zero chance of seeing a gymnast in 2 Olympics.