It has long been realized that the exigencies of systems programming require primitives that behave indeterminately. The best-known dataflow primitive is the so called fair merge which abstracts aspects of fair resource allocation. It has been known for about two deacdes that fair primitives lead to unbounded indeterminacy. Around seven years ago E. W. Stark, Vasant Shanbhogue and I discovered that various variants of fair merge primitives, all manifesting unbounded indeterminacy, were provably different. These differences are based on simple monotonicity properties. In the present paper I review these results and discuss some related phenomena involving a fair stack. I then describe results about fair splitting. These results are based on topological properties rather than simple order-theoretic properties. This gives some basic insight into what can and cannot be described by oracles and the relative power of various oracles. Finally I describe a result, implicitly due to Jim Russel...