Here is a better implementation of an "every 10th item" list comprehension, that does not use the list contents as part of the membership test:
>>> l = range(165)
>>> [ item for i,item in enumerate(l) if i%10==0 ]
[0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 110, 120, 130, 140, 150, 160]
>>> l = list("ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ")
>>> [ item for i,item in enumerate(l) if i%10==0 ]
['A', 'K', 'U']
But this is still far slower than just using list slicing.