I do understand that from time to time, theymos might change the monthly quantity of smerits that any source receives, but I did not imagine that such monthly allotment would have gone as low as 15 smerits per month. 

Of course, I understand that theymos can do whatever he wants in terms of quantity of source smerits, and I doubt the algorithm would require him to have any number higher than 1 source smerits per month, if he were to so chose, and perhaps some low number merit sources, like 15 source smerits per month, would be either a way of trying someone out or an attempt to get smerits distributed more widely.  I would have imagined that in real practice the real lowest of any source is in the 50 source smerits per month territory... but i don't know any specific examples that are lower than 50 (it is hard to prove a negative), so if anyone knows of any actual examples of a source (without necessarily naming names) who has lower than 50 source smerits per month, then, to me, that would be an interesting revelation of an actual case.   

By the way, the monthly quantity of any smerit source would be difficult to determine, by inference on the lower end, because the source might not be spending all of the source smerit allotment, yet on the upper end, it would be a bit more easily determined, especially if the smerit source is spending a high quantity of smerits that go beyond his/her initial allotments and what s/he is gaining through regular received merits from other members.