Are you thinking water heater or filter? Because I’ve never seen a water softener that can fit under a sink or on a showerhead. Unless you’re talking about phosphate feeder cartridges but those don’t actually soften water they just help keep limescale from sticking.

got stuck with one of those whole-house water softeners.

Wait, what other kind of water softener is there? Maybe it’s just because I live in an area where our water is practically more limestone than water, but I’ve only ever heard of whole house water softener.

As far as the rest of your comment. My experience is slightly different. I have several older relatives who have no known mental issues who have the same issues as your mom. But on the other hand my dad who doesn’t use social media because he has MS and it makes it hard for him to type, is still sharp as a whip when it comes to spotting scams. He’s pretty tech illiterate but he can still easily spot and ignore dogey emails and links. It seems almost like social media has conditioned most boomers to be more likely to fall for scams. Of course corolation doesn’t imply causation. Maybe it’s just that more scam savvy people are more likely to recognize most social media as being a scam so they don’t use it.

*fuckers

You can already do that though. Basically any truck just has a control on the dash to disable the passenger side airbag in case you neet to put a car seat there. You can also just remove the airbags in any existing vehicle as is. It really isn’t hard to do. People are just hesitant to do so because if you screw up then you can set the airbag off.

More importantly though why would the software being foss effect the airbags? The airbags shouldn’t be interacting with the vehicle software at all.

People have been doing dumb things with their cars since the invention of cars. Making them harder to repair via locked down software isn’t the fix for that.