“Rule #1: Don’t be a member of an immigrant community known for harboring gangs and smuggling in cash and expensive jewelry past customs and IRS agents, and then keep that undeclared property in your home so it can’t be taxed or counted against you when you apply for welfare benefits.”
Actually, you bring up a good point, that I’ve mentioned before, which is the following:
In general, people will NOT invade a house unless they know that there is some kind of a payoff possible. For example, if they know that there is some nice jewelry, it might be worth an invasion. So how do they know if there’s jewelry? Well, you have a plumber that you really trust, which is fine - he’s 52 years old, really nice, and has been in business for 25 years. But what about his 22 year old assistant (who might speak broken English, or who might be a red-blooded American)? That’s where the problem starts. This 22 year old may actually be background-checked (although not necessarily), and may be as clean as a whistle, but he may also have friends from high school that he tips off, for a cut of the action. You simply never know. So now the assistant knows your house, and sure enough, his ‘friends’ get the booty.
So, for the above, what can be done? The best answer is to MINIMIZE the number of strangers that go inside of your house. And the way to do that is to not need a plumber, but to change the water heater yourself - or do the tiling yourself. Or, at worst, hide EVERYTHING of value if you do bring outsiders in.
In fact, here in Houston, one big Air Conditioning company, Weeks (I believe), now advertises that they run background checks on all of their employees. They even go as far as advertising that Air Conditioning repair is the NUMBER ONE trade studied by incarcerated criminals here in Texas. It’s a nasty way to draw customers, but that’s life. What Weeks doesn’t mention is whether they perform background checks on the ‘friends’ of their workers...which, of course, they don’t, since that is virtually impossible.
So, it’s a lot to expect everyone to be functionally capable in the key trades (i.e., electrical, plumbing, AC repair, etc.) as I am, but it’s not as hard as it might sound. For example, I had an instructor once say that 90% of AC problems are electrical-related (as opposed to freon). Well, I’ve dealt with 6 problems, and, sure enough, all 6 have been electrical (4 capacitors, 1 relay, 1 condenser motor). They are not hard to troubleshoot. Likewise, nearly everything one needs to know about residential electrical work can be found in a basic book on the subject. Likewise with plumbing. Still not comfortable with it - make junior learn something useful, in addition to wasting his time being a ‘Communications’ major.