Week 284

We had an enjoyable, but somewhat low-energy, meeting of the Little Schemer Book Club on Monday at GFRHQ. We staggered as far as the end of chapter 6 aided by a stash of hipster beer and birthday ¹ cake generously supplied by Tom Stuart. The bit I found most interesting was implementing infix arithmetic evaluation in Scheme.

Chris has valiantly continued to migrate our Linode VPS to a new instance. I hesitate to say it, but I really think this is very nearly done!

Credit Union

Other than that we’ve spent most of the week beavering away figuring out how to setup a credit union. Amazingly we’ve been writing up notes every day to try to keep ourselves on track:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4

Given the opaqueness of the process and the apparent time & cash involved, I’m increasingly amazed that anyone has ever successfully setup a credit union.

My sense it that much of the documentation is written for the benefit of the regulators and not the credit unions themselves. Let’s hope that the Treasury’s Credit Union Consultation instigates some improvements in this area.

It also feels as if the whole process is aimed at a credit union that conforms to very old-school ideas of a “business” i.e. up-front investment against a 3-5 year business plan, rather than a lean start-up type approach. Right now I think we’re most interested in questioning the appropriateness of some of the hoops that stand in our way.

Anyway, onwards and upwards.

– James